It Started With a Family Tree. It Became ‘a Memorial to Everything.’

A search for his origins led Archie Moore to the farthest corners of Australia’s history and the Golden Lion prize at the Venice Biennale.

At the center of Archie Moore’s “Kith and Kin,” installed in the Australian pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale, a large tabletop hovers above an inky reflecting pool. The table holds stacks of paper, each pile an official record of an Indigenous Australian’s death in custody since 1991. On the pavilion’s black walls, a chalk drawing traces a genealogical map.

The diagram starts at the bottom with the artist himself (“Me”) and soars upward and outward — to his paternal side in England and Scotland, and to his maternal side, with thousands of names representing 2,400 generations and more than 65,000 years of Aboriginal life on the Australian continent. Erasures and gaps indicate massacres, disease outbreaks and other events that interrupted not only family lines, but the oral transmission of First Nations history.

Amid the sensory overload of the Biennale, which runs through Nov. 24, Moore’s installation offers an opportunity to slow down and take in something that begins with the history of Australia’s Indigenous people but ultimately connects to the rest of humanity and even to the natural world. As the artist has described it, it’s “a memorial to everything that has ever lived.”

Moore made history in April by becoming the first Australian artist to win the exhibition’s coveted Golden Lion award. The achievement was all the more remarkable given that Moore is only the second First Nations artist to have a solo presentation in Australia’s national pavilion, he has had very few exhibitions outside Australia, and he doesn’t show at a blue-chip gallery. The announcement of the prize was celebrated in Australia’s Parliament in May. In August, the government announced it was purchasing the work, making it a gift to both the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane and the Tate museum group in London.

But perhaps more significant than the official recognition has been its meaning for First Nations people, who are still waiting for a full reckoning with Australia’s colonial history. That history began with the arrival of British fleets in 1788 and has included the displacement of Indigenous peoples from their land, suppression of their languages, forced removal of children from their families, indentured labor, and, in recent decades, a disproportionate degree of incarceration.