SYDNEY.- The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia presents Warraba Weatherall: Shadow and Substance. This timely exhibition reflects on the acquisition and display of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural materials and property from the 19th century to the present day.

Shadow and Substance is the first solo museum exhibition by Kamilaroi artist Warraba Weatherall (b. 1987, Toowoomba, Queensland). Curated by MCA Australia Curator Megan Robson in the Level 1 South Gallery, Shadow and Substance brings together new and recent works, alongside loans from public and private collections.

The exhibition features dynamic installation, sculpture and video works which critique narratives found within archival and museum collections. In this presentation, Weatherall illustrates how the objects, materials and documentation held within museums ‘hold power’ and as such have great influence. The selected works draw attention to the ethics of how Indigenous property, cultural information and materials have been acquired and displayed.

By foregrounding individual and community histories, including his own family’s experience, the artist highlights the gaps and biases of the colonial record, as well as its ongoing influence. Through his artworks, Weatherall presents alternative ways of seeing and understanding our colonial past and offers future models for cross-cultural dialogues.

Artist Warraba Weatherall said, ‘People need to understand that contemporary perspectives of Indigenous peoples have been shaped by the exploitation of cultural property, which are generationally naturalised and reinforced through social and political systems. In this way, cultural property and documentation are not benign materials, but signifiers of contemporary violence.’

Keith Munro, MCA Australia Director First Nations Art and Cultures said, ‘Warraba Weatherall’s contemporary art practice is inspired in part by the archive of cultural and ancestral material that has been shaped, defined and classified by western knowledge structures. These considered artworks open up space for dialogue and new ways of engaging these important issues.'

Exhibition Highlights

Premiering in Australia is the major new commission Trace (2025), a partnership between MCA Australia and the Hawaiʻi Triennial 2025. The sculptural installation is informed by anatomical records belonging to Weatherall’s family members, which the artist sourced from institutional collections. While living on Country in Brewarrina, north-west New South Wales, in the early 20th century, Weatherall’s ancestors were subject to the scientific racism practiced by visiting American biologist and eugenicist Charles Davenport (1866–1944). The personal data Davenport had collected was later published without the permission of the artist’s family. In this major work, the artist re-envisions the tools used by anthropologists and eugenicists to measure and categorise First Nations peoples in the 19th and 20th century.

The exhibition will also premiere a new 2-channel video installation, Dialectic (2025), in which Weatherall positions the archive as a site of conflict. The work incorporates film footage and audio recordings the artist found in open-source archives in Australia and across the world. In this work, Weatherall illustrates how historical materials that present racist typologies and stereotypes have been legitimised through their collection by cultural and educational institutions. The video also raises important questions about the continued distribution of this material through unrestricted open-access and digitalisation policies.

Over the last decade Weatherall has undertaken extensive research into the histories of Kamilaroi cultural materials in public and private collections. In To know and possess (2021–2025), an installation of 30 bronze memorial plaques, the artist reflects on the widespread removal of First Nations materials and cultural property from Country as part of large-scale acquisition programs for Australian and international museums, private collections and universities.

In the installation, Dirge (2023), the artist draws attention to the way in which information is ‘translated and transmitted’. For this work, Weatherall has created a large-scale, custom-built polyphon – a disc-operated musical instrument. The score is a Braille translation of a colonial document relating to Aboriginal land rights the artist found in an Australian museum.

The exhibition also references the artist’s reworking of familiar materials and objects used to store information and data, such as filing cabinets, archive boxes and index cards. For Single File (2019/2025), the artist has adapted a filing cabinet to fit his own body. In this work, Weatherall highlights the lack of Indigenous agency within the archive, reflecting on the collection and classification of data about First Nations peoples and subsequent use in reports and policy making.

Created to commemorate the 30th anniversary of Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (1987–1990), InstitutionaLies (2017/2025) is a large-scale sculpture that considers the origins of the ‘structural, systematic injustice’ that was found by the Commission to underpin the over-representation of Aboriginal peoples in Australian prisons. The work reflects on the ongoing influence of colonial policies of surveillance and scientific study which disproportionately impact Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.

Visitors to the exhibition will be able to view a range of audio-visual content about the exhibition and access a free audio guide by the artist.