• Gordon Bennett
  Settler and Shadow Reflection, 1993
  Courtesy the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane
  Photograph: John O’Brien
  

Gordon Bennett has developed a reputation since the late 1980s for producing thought-provoking works. For the Biennale, he took the theme Revolutions – Forms That Turn literally and proposed to reposition paintings from the Indigenous collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales in the colonial painting galleries on the ground level where European painters and Australians of Western descent are represented. The paintings they would replace were to be moved down to the Indigenous galleries of Yiribana. He also proposed to turn all the relocated paintings upside down. The proposal was an attempt to eliminate separations within the museum and disrupt the gallery’s established collecting and exhibiting policy. It was rejected by the museum. A scale replica of the galleries with miniatures of the artworks are all that is left of Bennett’s challenging and revolutionary artistic dream – a proposal for a future potential re-hang of the museum’s collections.

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