With performers Lukás Avendaño, Joseph M. Pierce, Maddee Clark, Nicholas Galanin, Javier Stell-Fresquez, Dakota Comacho, Jack Grey, Carly Sheppard, Gallermic Mabuse, Ben Parangi, Tohil Fidel Brito Bernal, Ileini Kabalan and S.J Norman For Magna Mater, S.J Norman invited 12 Indigenous people who identify as men, are on the masculine spectrum, or were assigned male at birth, and with whom Norman is in kinship, to document themselves having their hair brushed, 100 strokes each day, over the course of the same moon cycle, by a caregiver or caregivers from their family or community. The hairbrushes used for these actions, with strands of hair collected over time, are displayed on chairs facing the films of the performers, evoking a multiple presence and resonance of the original processes. The footage was taken by the performers on their personal smartphones. The work inverts a museological and anthropological fascination with Indigenous bodies by centring acts of consensual intimacy and care between people, and by connecting Indigenous people through a shared performance across time and space.

S.J Norman is a cross-disciplinary artist and writer. He is a non-binary transmasculine person and a diasporic Koori of Wiradjuri descent, born on Gadigal land. Norman’s work centres the corporeal and the inter-corporeal: he inhabits and disrupts the prevailing vocabularies of performance as a queer/ed Indigenous body, addressing that body as both site and material. He utilises ephemeral, process-based and long-durational practices as a means of antagonising the prevailing economies of colonial spectatorship and capital value, as well as a means to excavate and elevate embodied knowledges.

Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney with generous support from John Wardle Architects and assistance from Australia Council for the Arts.