CIPX Kaurna Miyurna (Critical Indigenous Photographic Exchange with the Kaurna Community)

These works form part of the Critical Indigenous Photographic Exchange (CIPX), an international Indigenous portraiture project conceived by Will Wilson, a Diné (Navajo) artist based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. The CIPX project invites Indigenous photographers from around the world to create portraits of members of their local communities using the nineteenth-century tintype process.

Kaurna artists Damien Shen and James Tylor have contributed to this contemporary project, which seeks to recontextualise early photographic documentation of Kaurna people produced by European colonists and anthropologists in South Australia during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These CIPX portraits differ significantly from earlier images of Aboriginal people taken by Europeans, and the project is designed to prioritise agency and respect for contemporary Indigenous sitters.

Image: Damien Shen, Ngarrindjeri / Kaurna people, South Australia / Chinese, born Tarntanya (Adelaide), South Australia 1976, James Tylor, Kaurna people, South Australia / Māori, Te Arawa iwi, Aotearoa (New Zealand), born Mildura, Latje Latje Country, Victoria 1986, CIPX Kaurna Miyurna Michael O'Brien (Kaurna / Narungga people, South Australia), 2026, Tarntanya (Adelaide), reproduction of tintype photograph on aluminium, 100.0 x 80.0 cm; Courtesy of the artists