Perhaps the most astonishing thing about Adelaide’s proposed Aboriginal Arts and Cultures Centre (AACC), by Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Woods Bagot, is that such an institution doesn’t already exist in Australia. Though two other comparable projects have been proposed, in the Northern Territory and Western Australia respectively, both are less advanced than the AACC, which is expected to start construction later this year and open in 2025. SANAA’s Sydney Modern addition to the Art Gallery of New South Wales, unveiled in 2020, will also include an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander gallery but not a stand-alone center.
The absence of such a key institution no doubt reflects Australia’s troubled relationship with its colonial past, as well as the widespread belief that Aboriginal cultures are largely immaterial and therefore difficult to exhibit and the fact that many critical objects were stolen in the early days of the colony and now reside in Paris and elsewhere. Orthodox approaches to Aboriginal art tend (perhaps for the same reasons and notwithstanding distinctly art-world price tags) to the semi-anthropological, emphasizing bark, craft, and ochre. This new project, if approved, stands to remedy all that, becoming a critical pivot in Australia’s cultural history. In 2018, DS+R and Woods Bagot were announced the winners of the design competition for Adelaide's new facility, but the proposal has changed dramatically since then, from a silvery, rigged volume to something more organic, and now with focus on Aboriginal cultures instead of art in general.
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