Each week, Benjamin Law asks public figures to discuss the subjects we’re told to keep private by getting them to roll a die. The numbers they land on are the topics they’re given. This week, he talks to Archie Moore. The Kamilaroi/Bigambul artist, 53, will represent Australia at the 2024 Venice Biennale – making him only the second solo First Nations artist to take over the pavilion at the world’s oldest contemporary art exhibition.
Very scant. My father was an earth-mover: he drove bulldozers and graders, making rows and dams, clearing land. My mother was on the pension. She only had a few years of school, so she wasn’t really able to work in many jobs. We didn’t have much money. We lived in a house that had holes in it: it was cold in the winter and hot in the summer. I remember eating white bread broken up in milk with white sugar when we had no money.
In the many decades of Australia’s participation at the Venice Biennale, only Tracey Moffatt – in 2017 – has exhibited solo as a First Nations artist before now. What’s it like being the second?