Australia in the Gropius Bau: The truth about the rainbow snake

Flexibility is key when fishing with a bow and arrow, explains Daniel Boyd. “To Sagittarius it may appear as if the fish is below the surface of the water at a certain point, but you have to factor in the refraction of light.

The fish swims somewhere else,” says the artist, who is initially presenting four pictures in the inner courtyard of the Gropius Bau, four variations of one and the same motif of a bow fisherman. Like this man from Oceania, the viewers of the solo exhibition “Rainbow Serpent (Version)” have to be mobile.

In Daniel Boyd’s first major solo show in Europe, you won’t get any further with a narrow-minded view and a rigid perspective. The ancestors of the artist, who was born in Queensland, Australia in 1982, come from the South Seas or were Aborigines. Boyd’s exhibition title alludes to the figure of the rainbow serpent, which is important to the Australian Aborigines. There is not just one rainbow snake, but many versions of the creator myth. And also the Western ethnologists and the interpretative sovereignty that they claim.

Break up rigid perspectives

Boyd’s image sources are diverse. Many of his templates come from Oceania or Australia, whereby the artist repeatedly mixes “false” with “authentic” images. A “Rebbelib” map can be seen, which residents of the Marshall Islands use to find out about waves and current conditions.

Equally abstract is a sand drawing reproduced in a Boyd painting from the island of Vanuatu, where one of the artist’s great-great-grandfathers lived before he was taken to North Queensland to toil on the sugar cane plantations there. Another picture shows the legendary three-master Bounty – as a replica for the Hollywood film. In large format, Boyd quotes the “Portrait of Omai” painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds around 1776 – the likeness of a young Polynesian in the pose of Apollo Belvedere, as a noble savage.

Remembering the “Stolen Generation”

For Boyd, the colonial practice of ignoring indigenous traditions, breaking them and replacing them with Western ideas is nothing historical, but can be felt on a daily basis: “Western culture was forced on the children of the First Nations,” says the artist. A landscape format is based on a photograph of his sister getting ready for a dance.

The image commemorates the “Stolen Generations”, the children forcibly separated from their families by the Australian government (from the 19th century and into the 1970s). Housed in foster families or mission stations, they were denied contact with First Nations cultural practices. The point of the picture: Boyd’s sister will continue to dance the dance forced on her people. An act that undermines common notions of cultural heritage and authorship – and presents reappropriation as a form of resistance.

It’s complicated. Boyd skips the easy answers. This is reflected in particular in his painting style, which is reminiscent of the pointillism of Georges Seurat and also of the desert paintings by Aborigine artists (and has little to do with either). Boyd first paints the motif, which often comes from a photo template, on the canvas, in a second step he dabs clear archive glue onto the paint layer.

After the glue has dried, the acrylic drops are painted with black paint. The original motif shimmers through the drop pattern. “The idea behind this,” says Boyd, “is that there are thousands of little lenses spread across the surface of the image. Lenses that capture the light. I don’t want to see images as static objects, rather the audience should be able to move through a plural world.”

A small-format portrait edited as described shows Édouard Glissant (1928-2011), the Martinique-born philosopher and poet best known for his concept of the “right to opacity and difference”. Glissant argued that imperialism and colonialism imposed Western notions of transparency around the world, which, however, meant for colonized people to be categorized and judged by prejudice. Glissant’s thinking became an important reference for the artist. By treating light and darkness equally in his pictures – in the form of blackened spaces – Boyd points to the fluid and fragmentary character of knowledge.

The typical Boyd grid can also be found on the mirror surface attached to the floor of the inner courtyard, over which visitors can move; in addition, the windows on the first floor – where most of the 44 paintings are hung in a loose sequence – are covered with perforated black foil. The light shimmers, and after lingering in Boyd’s magical imagery, one has the feeling of being immersed in a dreamtime – and ripe for throwing some certainties overboard.

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