Fiona Foley

(born 1964)

Badtjala Women, 1994,

Footnotes

PROVENANCE
Niagara Galleries, Melbourne
Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 2006

EXHIBITED
Bangu Yilbara: Works from the MCA Collection, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 11 May - 1 October 2006, (another example)
Forbidden: Fiona Foley, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 12 November 2009 - 31 January 2010, then touring, University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane, 19 February - 2 May 2010, (another example)
People of the First Sunrise: Indigenous Art from Eastern Australia, Glasshouse Port Macquarie, New South Wales, 24 June - 7 August 2011, (another example)
Volume One: MCA Collection, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 12 March 2012 - 31 July 2016 (another example)

RELATED WORK
Other examples from this edition are held in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane

Of this series, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, notes the following,

'The three sepia-toned photographs in Fiona Foley's Badtjala Woman series are based on colonial images of Badtjala people, whose country includes Thoorgine or K'gari (Fraser Island), taken by an ethnographic photographer in around 1899. The images are held in the John Oxley Library in Brisbane, and were used by Foley in an earlier installation, Lost Badtjalas – Severed Hair, 1991.

For Badtjala Woman, Foley has replicated the head and shoulders composition of ethnographic photography, which aimed to record its subject not as an individual but a type; a subject whose exotic features and behaviour could be scientifically catalogued. She has also included the woven bag and necklaces that were collected by ethnographers as records of Indigenous material cultures, and which were important products of women's work.

Nakedness was often demanded by ethnographic photographers, who asked their subjects to undress in order to conform to an idea of what an 'authentic' Indigenous person looked like. These images were then sometimes circulated for non-scientific purposes as exotica, in the manner of Paul Gauguin's island Venuses − a western imagining of the mythical sexuality of 'black' women.

Foley critiques the operation of colonial power disseminated through this kind of imagery by taking it over – directing the shoot and posing for the photographs herself. In doing so, she overturns the anonymity and subjugation of the original subjects and aligns herself with them as their descendant, a contemporary Badtjala woman in control of her own identity and image.'