ANZJA Call for Papers

Calls for Papers | About | Past Issues

Boundary Bend where the Murray and Murrumbidgee rivers meet in north-western Victoria, Australia. This is Country where Tati Tati, Wiradjuri, Muti Muti, Wamba Wamba and Latje Latje Aboriginal nations meet, a relationality just like this beautiful tree showing connections of what is above, below and around. Photo: Brian Martin, August 2021.

Call for Articles | Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art 25.1 | Special Issue: Tarrang

Submissions due: Papers due Monday 1 March, 2024

Editors: Brian Martin and Jessica Neath

Editorial Committee: Dr Diana Baker Smith, Professor Jennifer Biddle, Dr Bianca Hester, Dr Astrid Lorange, José da Silva, Dr Jaye Early and Dr Verónica Tello 

The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art (ANZJA) is calling for submissions for the Special Issue (25.1) Tarrang. The Special Issue builds on the 2023 exhibition More Than A Tarrang (tree): Memory, Material and Cultural Agency, curated by Brian Martin, Jessica Neath, Kimberley Moulton and Brook Andrew for Bunjilaka Aboriginal Cultural Centre, Melbourne Museum. We invite Indigenous-led submissions worldwide and welcome co-authorship of research articles with non-Indigenous scholars, researchers, curators, designers and artists.

The exhibition More Than A Tarrang (tree): Memory, Material and Cultural Agency considers the significance of trees in First Peoples cultures of southeast Australia and continuing practices of mark-making. As Boon Wurrung Senior Elder N’Arweet Carolyn Briggs AM reminds us, trees are living entities that articulate our relationships to Country, each other, and Ancestors. In southeast Australia and beyond, culturally modified trees and wooden vessels, including canoes and coolamons, articulate a complex knowledge system. Uncle Charles Moran and Uncle Greg Harrington, Elders of the Bundjalung Nation, and Wiradjuri scholar Norm Sheehan describe this system as “living in intelligent environments” where “the agency of all forms of life” is recognised and respected. Colonialism has disrupted this knowledge system through institutions such as the museum, which have actively removed cultural belongings from Country. To restore and regenerate our relational ways of being with trees, in More Than A Tarrang (tree), we produced a series of connections between contemporary artworks and cultural belongings from the collections of the Melbourne Museum, the British Museum and the Museum der Kulturen Basel alongside new research developed with Indigenous Knowledge holders.

Building on our methods, this Special Issue of ANZJA, Tarrang invites creative practitioners and researchers who are reimagining museums, the value of cultural heritage, and our relationships with the environment. We will foreground Indigenous understandings of Country and where knowledge sits. Topics may include:

• What are the synergies between Indigenous ways of knowing and practice-led research?
• How are communities, artists, designers, curators and others engaging with the significance of trees in First Peoples cultures?
• Why is it important for First Peoples artists, curators, Traditional Owners and others to reconnect with cultural materials in museum collections?
• What forms can repatriation or restitution of cultural belongings take, and what are the intersections with contemporary creative practice?
• How are programs of community access to museum collections benefitting First Peoples communities and institutions?
• How are practices of mark marking, including using digital technologies, creating a dialogue with cultural belongings, trees and other subjects?
• What are the protocols around, or methods for, sharing knowledge of particular cultural belongings, trees and other subjects which serve ceremonial purposes?
• How are First Peoples artists, curators, communities and others reimagining the role of museums and the value of cultural heritage?

The guest editors, Martin and Neath, will hold a symposium at Melbourne Museum alongside the exhibition More Than A Tarrang (tree): Memory, Material and Cultural Agency on 2 and 3 November 2023. Authors interested in submitting to the special issue of ANZJA are encouraged to attend. Please get in touch to find out more about the symposium: Jessica.Neath@monash.edu. Any queries regarding the journal should be directed to the ANZJA Managing Editor Anastasia Murney, a.murney@unsw.edu.au

More Than A Tarrang (tree): Memory, Material and Cultural Agency is part of the ARC Special Research Initiative “More Than a Guulany (tree): Indigenous Knowledge Systems” (SR200201054) at Wominjeka Djeembana Indigenous research lab, Monash University.