Yhonnie Scarce: Missile Park catalogue

Yhonnie Scarce: Missile Park is the first survey exhibition of leading contemporary artist Yhonnie Scarce, and brings a major new commission into dialogue with work that spans the past fifteen years of the artist’s career. 

Scarce’s works in this survey reference the on-going effects of colonisation on Aboriginal people, responding to research into the impact of nuclear testing and the removal and relocation of Aboriginal people from their homelands and the forcible removal of Aboriginal children from their families. Born in Woomera, South Australia in 1973, Scarce belongs to the Kokatha and Nukunu peoples, and family history is central to Scarce’s works in this show. This survey also includes major works that engage with the disciplinary forms of colonial institutions and representation – religion, ethnography, medical science, museology, taxonomy – as well as monumental and memorial forms of public art and remembrance.

Featuring full-colour documentation of all the works in the exhibition, the catalogue includes a foreword by ACCA’s Artistic Director and CEO Max Delany and the IMA Artistic Director and CEO, Liz Nowell; a pictorial essay by Yhonnie Scarce; a curatorial essay by Lisa Waup, Max Delany and Liz Nowell; alongside newly commissioned essays by Daniel Browning, Hannah Presley and Lisa Waup; a new poem by Natalie Harkin; and a special reprint of a text by Louis Anderson Mokak. 

This exhibition and publication have been produced in collaboration with the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, and supported by the Gordon Darling Foundation.  

Format: Paperback
Publisher: Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Institute of Modern Art
Published: 2021
Pages: 147
ISBN:9780648435365