Blak* works from Flinders University Museum of Art
First Nations artists often actively work outside of western disciplines of knowledge and artistic practice, the term “un-discipline” in this sense engages movements of methodological refusal or rebuttal. The works in this exhibition unsettle ideas of authority and systems of discipline that seek to control, order, correct, contain, and render the world fully knowable. These artists challenge normative structures, they reframe, disrupt, or remake the representation of so-called-complete settler- colonial processes.
Un-discipline considers moments of change that are not reliant on violent physical force but instead challenge dominant systems of classification. These works disallow uninterrupted authority over; the division of land into property, division of knowledge into fields, culture into objects, and humans into governed individual- race- gender identities. To un-discipline is not simply to reject order, but to move beyond the assumption that order must be singular, hierarchical, or externally imposed. Holding space for the unknown, ephemeral, relational, embodied, situated, and cyclical rather than extractive or taxonomic. In this sense, being un-disciplined is not chaos, but open to that which will always resist containment within structures of surveillance and control.
Works in this exhibition reflect ideas of un-discipline through their resistance to the colonial systems that have sought to define, contain, and interpret First Nations knowledges and culture. Moving fluidly across art, story, language, memory, archive, and activism, these works defy fixed categories, dominant narratives and assumed methods and materials. Through acts of reclamation, disruption and renewal these works assert creative sovereignty over how knowledge is held and shared.
* The spelling “Blak” is attributed to the artist, broadcaster, and political activist Destiny Deacon (1957–2024), a descendant of the KuKu (Far North Queensland) and Erub/Mer (Torres Strait) peoples. She introduced it as a strategic act of reclamation and reworking of “Black,” signalling a specifically Indigenous Australian cultural and political identity distinct from Anglo-American racial terminology.
