 Kiora Koto, Yiridumarang, Induga, Jazz, Yunadi, Radri, Yena, Baladu, Tefanganui, Atara, Nurembang, Warana. Sorry, that was Radri, which is my grandmother's language. My nation is in the place now known as New South Wales, Australia. This is my boss, Jean-Pierre Chabrol. We come from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. And in that acknowledgement then I just thanked the ancestors and caretakers of this place for their ongoing care of the skies, waters and land. I also want to say a special acknowledgement to the Koningu Elders of Western Arnhem Land of whose sacred stories and knowledges we'll be discussing in this talk, which is about the wonderful John Mawangil. John O'Ballon, which is his skin name, we'll probably refer to him interchangeably as John O'Ballon, is a Koningu elder and lawman and a really remarkable contemporary artist. His stories are very sacred, very contemporary, and it's real honour to talk about them. And there's also an acknowledgement that we can play now of John's. So the context of Australia is very different to the context here as I'm realising increasingly while we're here, which is that in Australia we have more than 250 independent Aboriginal nations and Torres Strait Islander nations and more than 600 dialects. So doing things in language is different in Australia to how it is here. I wish it was more like here. I wish that there was a bilinguality that was embedded in our society. We're not there yet. So what we're going to talk about in this presentation briefly is how we worked with John and his Koningu community in Manangrida to develop the exhibition, but more specifically the digital resources that accompanied it. The adventure of this digital resource and especially the exhibition came from a long, long while. So the MCA had a long relation with Balang and they started to collect works in 1988, and Balang did start to be collected in different organisations from 83. So he was quite young, was 30, 83, so he would be 31. And so this long kind of a relation with contemporary art did enforce the way we were going to work with them. It's what we're doing at the MCA. We work with believing artists and we try to focus only on the artist and the artist will and the artist voice. So of course the digital resource was built around the exhibition and for the purpose of serving this exhibition and also two partners. They were two partners in the show. We're just going to show you a little trailer which was kind of the marketing process of showing the show. My own tool. So during that process of building the exhibition and the relation which was pretty much during three years of organising the exhibition and for us in terms of the digital department during two years, quite quickly we knew the title which was coming from him which was very much I am the old and the new. So how to bring the old culture and his painting which represents something very specific to a new form and to a way that we were going to make the curatorial voice if I can say that way or any voice disappear and have only his voice and his painting and his drawings. There are quite interesting quotes from Eddie Perkins. We had a long relation with him during years and he did an exhibition a long time ago at the MCA with him. So it's an interesting read. It was an interesting challenge working with an artist who is internationally very well recognised. Balon's the only Australian artist to ever have two solo shows in Europe, but simultaneously is not a household name in Australia and had never had a major show in Australia. So we were working with a contemporary artist who speaks a multitude of languages and none of which are English with a great deal of fluency, who has a really rich biography and an incredibly large body of work, but we wanted to do him justice in the way that he asked and he said very deliberately to us very early on, to know me you need to know Guiningu which is his language and his cosmology. And Guiningu cosmology does not translate easily into a western context, so we needed to bring the dignity and gravitas to that without reducing it in any way. The screen that we just had then was of the Manangrida area in western Arnhem Land where Balon lives. It is one of the most linguistically complex places on earth. Manangrida town alone has 12 language groups that are spoken daily there. And the community is, the cosmology of the community is so rich and it's depicted largely in Balon's work. He paints a lot of sacred stories that are embedded with a lot of esoteric knowledge, that talk of ceremony and talk of tradition. As a non-Gingu person, I can't read that information, but we wanted to bring that complexity to the project. One of the things that came quite quickly in the exhibition process and in the catalogue and we did want to serve in the digital space is the notion of places or location. And you can see on this map different, the big letters are the language and you also got the place. So you see on the bottom left, Guiningu, you got places like Mumeca, etc. And those places were kind of the metadata in some way, if I can say, at the crowd of the artwork. But the places were also very important. So we had to design the entire things from the places to the artwork, to the voice. Which was something that was reflected in the curation of the exhibition itself. So rather than going chronologically or any other way that an exhibition can be laid out, as you walked through the exhibition, you walked through significant places around Manangrida and the artworks that responded to those places. So that, yeah, that is what we reflected in the digital resource. There was a lot of work and thanks to one man, which was Dr. Meregaard, which is on the picture here on the left, who did a massive work in terms of translation and transliteration of all the discussion. So we had with Balang Manangrida. You need to remember that Balang English is very simple and poor. So everything was done in language. The exhibition was totally bilingual, which was kind of a premiere for Australia because of the complexity of it, because of the diversity of the languages. So you see a few images of the exhibition. Balang did around more than 1,000 works in his life and this was a 10% of his representation. There was a digital resource with a video. It was two locations. He went to Adelaide and he's touring at the moment during two years around Australia. That's the language and the digital resource part. And of course all the locations were mapped through the exhibition. So each number in fact here is a location, is a place. So if you were to go to the website right now, jamalangrida.com, you'd find a very complex amount of data that I think is presented quite simply. We have a 40-minute documentary film that we shot all in Manangrida with Balang speaking Koningu to his friend Dr. Murray Gard. There wasn't any interruption of English or of like the curator sort of jumping in there. It was just one person explaining his life's work and artwork to his friend. The process of translating that was joyously complex, but like so. So you'd find that documentary, you'd find a glossary of Guningu, which as the project went on we realised that was sort of the key to lots of parts of the exhibition was the artworks are all Guningu words and to sort of understand even remotely what you're getting out with these words that have no English translation or no simple English translation. We needed to have a glossary that allowed Balang to speak his language so we did an audio recording with him and his grandson. That's him, oh no, that's not the one in the studio. But there we go, looking like a rock star. He's really easy. There was this huge bonus of doing the glossary which was that it meant that all the staff at the MCA at the Art Gallery of South Australia and at the Turing locations have a level of confidence that they can bring when discussing their artwork which is really prohibitive in the Australian context. People are afraid to speak Aboriginal languages because they don't know how it's meant to sound or what they're meant to do. So by providing this resource we actually unlocked a whole lot of the exhibition to people. So aside from the glossary of the films we've got all the artworks in high resolution. We've got acknowledgments of all the locations that the exhibition will tour to and a cultural warning or these things are part of a sort of indigenous level of safety that we need to provide for the artist in the communities. What else is there? That's a biography? This is a biography. We're just going to show a few screens of the process of... So we've been few times in Manningrida. To go to Western Manningrida to 200 kilometres east of Darwin for filming specifically you have to go in a very specific period because there's the wet season. So the two years period was not short and we had to really understand what was possible or not possible and to be in their rhythm, be part of it and they were directing us in terms of what to do or not to do. This is a screen of the complexity of the dual language so how to bring his voice, a transliteration of his voice and also the English in a dual caption system. So of course importance of listening and documenting the artist's voice. A few slides and I want to show you... That's another map of the location. I want to show you an extract of one video so it's the first vignette just to listen the two first minutes of his voice. I joined my own history. I already had a history, a long time ago. I had a new generation, new birth, history, good man history. Good man history, but I'm not going to make history now. I'm not going to make history. I'm not going to make new generation history. All people. This is my mother and we have been living here for a year. This is my mother, so now she has two children. One is my mother, and the other is my mother. She is my mother. My mother is a different person. So I just want to highlight briefly that all of the digital resources are owned by John and the Manangrida community. If at any point they want to take that, we're the custodians for now, we're caretaking for it, if they want that back at any moment we will return it to them, obviously it's their cultural knowledge. And everything that we've done was driven by Balang, everything that he asked for, we put on our digital producing hat and translated it into this site, we made sure that it was entirely directed by the artist, which sadly is not the norm in the Australian context working with Indigenous artists. I think I've got zero second there, but just few references, I suppose it will be online at one stage, the site had few awards. Balang had a lot of awards during his career, I remember filming him in 2003 for the Clemenger Award in Melbourne, so it's a long history of him winning and so when he knew about the different awards he said, yeah, that's normal, another one. And we were so excited about it. A few dot points that what we learned through the journey which was really the importance of listening, the importance of putting the artist up front and in the centre of everything we were doing and the complexity of transmitting knowledge and concept and try to be invisible in that process, including the design and the simplicity of it. Just one more 10 second thing because I've noticed the importance of the resource to the artist family. The catalogue that was printed was huge, fat, really expensive to ship. The exhibition, it's touring but it's not touring to Manangrida where this community are based. Having all these resources online has been a huge, really invaluable thing for the community which has been said back to us, that Balang's family are often on the site, the Manangrid Arts and who use our glossary for new staff. The benefits of the project and doing it well and having a deep listening relationship have been so much greater than we could have anticipated. Thank you so much.