The U.S. debut of a documentary by Tuan Andrew Nguyen potently combines with the museum’s recent gift of Aboriginal paintings in We Were Lost in Our Country.
RENO, NV—Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s We Were Lost in Our Country (2019) is a short film that explores the complex history of the Ngurrara Canvas II (1997)—a monumental painting created by forty-four Ngurrara painters that bolstered their successful legal bid for over 32,000 square miles of the Great Sandy Desert of Western Australia.
Titled after Nguyen’s film, the Nevada Museum of Art’s group exhibition We Were Lost in Our Country pairs the Vietnamese-American artist’s thirty-two-minute documentary with paintings from its recent gift of seventy-two Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander works from the Margaret Levi and Robert Kaplan collection. The thirty paintings in the exhibition are by artists from the same region, some of whom participated in painting the Ngurrara Canvas II.
A vibrant painting measuring twenty-six by thirty-two feet, the Ngurrara Canvas II was produced to support a landmark court hearing in 1997 before the Australian Native Title Tribunal to help the Ngurrara, Aboriginal people who originally lived in the Great Sandy Desert, claim ownership of their ancestral lands.
The painting is a complex composition amalgamating swirling topographical elements, memories, and a line marking the Canning Stock Route, the site where Aboriginal people first made contact with European settlers in the early 1900s. Decades of conflict and displacement ensued, including the rerouting of water sources and the forced labor of Aboriginal people.
During the ten-year land negotiations between the tribe and the Australian government, the Ngurrara Canvas II traveled throughout Australia. The first Ngurrara Canvas was painted in 1996 but was ultimately withdrawn by the artists, and later sold by Sotheby’s Sydney in 2003 for around $210,000 to benefit the Ngurrara, who eventually received the land title in 2007.
“An important concept is that these are not literal maps, but maps that contain information and knowledge that has been passed down for over 65,000 years,” says Apsara DiQuinzio, the museum’s senior curator of contemporary art. “It’s a profound demonstration of the relationship that these communities had with their land and their environment that has been going on for millennia.”
In the film, Nguyen follows artists like Ngirlpirr Spider Snell, Tommy May Ngarralja, Jarinyanu David Downs, and Jimmy Pike, who laid down the first line for the Ngurrara Canvas II—all of whom are represented in the current exhibition.
The Ngurrara Canvas II traveled outside of Australia in 2019, when it appeared with Nguyen’s film in the inaugural edition of the Sharjah Architecture Triennial. The painting and film “tell a story about how these artists worked for over a decade to achieve Native title through the Australian government,” DiQuinzio says, and serves as “a powerful vehicle to tell other stories about political agency and autonomy and achieving sovereignty over land that was wrongly taken away.”
Nguyen, who is best-known for his work with the Propeller Group, a conceptual and collaborative art collective he co-founded in 2006, was initially hesitant to accept the We Were Lost in Our Country commission as a non-Australian artist. He then traveled to the Great Sandy Desert with the Sharjah Architecture Triennial’s artistic director, Adrian Lahoud, to meet the Ngurrara Canvas II artists who are still alive. Their similar histories of displacement—Nguyen’s family came to the United States from Sài Gòn as political refugees in 1979—motivated him to move forward with the project.
“It was only after his visit with the artists that he understood the dialogue between his work and theirs—work that addresses displacement from your land,” DiQuinzio says. “But more importantly, he lets the artists tell their own story.”
In the film, Nguyen also draws from older footage by the Chinese-Australian filmmaker Nicole Ma, who followed artists like Ngirlpirr Spider Snell and Tommy May Ngarralja for around a decade for her 2015 film Putuparri and the Rainmakers. The museum screened the film as part of its programming in addition to another film Ma co-directed in 2003 titled Kurtal Snake Spirit.
The film “brings the paintings to life in ways that are meaningful and beautiful,” DiQuinzio adds. “It provides a strong juxtaposition, especially to Westerners who are perhaps not familiar with the themes, symbols, and styles that these artists work with.”
The museum plans to hold subsequent exhibitions to examine other strengths of the Levi-Kaplan acquisition, which it hopes will broaden the understanding of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art and history in the United States. The works have joined the museum’s Robert S. and Dorothy J. Keyser Art of the Greater West Collection, which has strong holdings of contemporary Indigenous art spanning from North America to Australia.
The acquisition comes as the Nevada Museum of Art undergoes a $60 million expansion and renovation slated to be completed next year, which will add more than 15,000 square feet of exhibition space and allow the museum to exhibit around 50% of its collection.
