Gordon Hookey

Born 1961 in Cloncurry, Australia
Lives and works in Brisbane, Australia
Waanji

Art Gallery of New South Wales

Terraist 2014
single-channel video, digital
1:55 min
Courtesy the artist and Milani Gallery

Fuck off French Fried Frog Face Frick 1995
oil on masonite
Courtesy the artist and Milani Gallery

In Terraist, Waanji artist Gordon Hookey depicts an army of kangaroos, representative of Indigenous people, protesting outside Parliament House. Brandishing spears, the kangaroos launch a nuclear missile at the government building, which erupts in a mushroom cloud of fungi.

Often playing with puns, Hookey spells ‘terrorist’ as ‘terraist’, invoking the legal concept used to justify settlement in Australia, terra nullius, while simultaneously mocking the colonial language that robbed him of his own Waanji language. Recognising that Aboriginal land rights remain contested and Indigenous lands continue to be despoiled, Terraist zeroes in on the hypocrisy of government policy.

In an earlier painting, Fuck off French Fried Frog Face Frick, Hookey turns his acerbic gaze towards the impact of French nuclear tests in the atolls of Fangataufa and Mururoa from the 1960s to the 1990s. Despite the French government’s original estimate that 10,000 people were exposed to nuclear radiation, new research suggests that 110,000 people from the predominantly Indigenous populations in the region were affected.

Gordon Hookey belongs to the Waanyi people and locates his art at the interface where Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal cultures converge. Hookey’s perspective comes from a divergent, activist positioning – his work challenges hierarchies, skewering the status and integrity of the ‘elite’, while working to bolster the position of the marginalised and oppressed. He is a core member of Indigenous collective proppaNOW alongside fellow artists including Richard Bell, Vernon Ah Kee and Jennifer Herd.  

Hookey explicitly attacks the establishment and implicates our current political representatives. His work is best known for its biting satire of Australia’s political landscape, its leaders and representatives, combining figurative characters, iconic symbols, bold comic-like text, and a spectrum of vibrant colours. 

Read more about the 24th Biennale of Sydney, Ten Thousand Suns, by purchasing the catalogue here.