Wandering through the Brisbane Gallery of Modern Art’s permanent collection of contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art, one can see just how many Indigenous artists have begun incorporating video art into their practice in recent years. GoMA’s contemporary Indigenous collection is one of the strongest of its kind in the country, and was exhibited from June to October 2013 in the survey show My Country, I Still Call Australia Home: Contemporary Art from Black Australia. On the walls hung video works by prominent artists such as Richard Bell, Vernon Ah Kee and Bindi Cole, and filmmakers such as Warwick Thornton and Genevieve Grieves. All used video to expand upon their exploration of Aboriginal identities and experiences, but what is also striking is the way these artists are reinvigorating a medium that has, in the wider field, largely lost touch with its political origins. These artists are using the now omnipresent medium to ask difficult questions about race and history that are rarely addressed in the public sphere.

From its inception in the late 1960s, video art was perceived as an oppositional practice. Technological evolution had placed the tools of TV in the hands of artists, giving birth to a new medium that many believed could turn capitalist ideology against itself. Through video, artists felt empowered to speak back to the mass messages broadcast by commercial television while also undermining the commercial logic and aesthetic hierarchies governing the art world. Part of video’s appeal lay in the fact that it was a medium whose history was yet to be written. In the intervening decades, the radical potential of video was quickly usurped by its ironic one, but in the work of many Indigenous artists, video’s potential as a political medium is being harnessed once more. A new generation of artists are employing it to rewrite historical and cultural narratives—colonial anthropology, religion, racism, the national apology, deaths in custody, to name a few—from an Indigenous perspective. Australia’s dominant images are peeled back to reveal the maelstrom of competing stories that swirl beneath.³