Tuan Andrew Nguyen: ‘The Boat People’

By Mark Rappolt

“If you could talk to your ancestors and old people, what would you say?”

“I’d ask them about how they grew up in the desert and how they lived out there, and ask them about all the old stories about the country and all the old songs and the meanings behind the songs and the stories.”

Tuan Andrew Nguyen, The Boat People (still), 2020, single-channel video, 4K, Super 16mm transferred to digital, colour, 5.1 surround sound. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York

That’s a conversation between two generations of the Ngurrara people that comes near the beginning of Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s 35-minute film We Were Lost in Our Country (2019), which made its debut at last year’s inaugural Sharjah Architecture Triennial. The film revolves around the creation of the Ngurrara Canvas II (1997), a collaborative artwork made by Ngurrara Elders that functions as a map, made from memory, of the territories, in what is now known as the Great Sandy Desert, that had been taken from their peoples, and from which they had largely been displaced, during the extended colonisation of Australia. “Crown land?” one of the Aboriginal interviewees says at one point during the film. “The Queen never fucking walked round here.” The painting was subsequently used as evidence in a successful Native Title claim that restored the territory to the Ngurrara people ten years later. (Ngurrara means ‘country’ in Walmajarri.) But it’s a territory about which younger generations, on whom a lifetime of displacement, poverty, alcoholism and suicide (in 2014 it was reported that Aboriginal peoples were six times more likely to commit suicide than non-Aboriginal peoples; 80 percent of those who committed suicide in 2011 were aged between eighteen and twenty-four) have taken their toll, often have no memory. “I didn’t know we came from the desert,” says another interviewee. “See, I grew up in a town.”...READ MORE