Returning to Mungo: Navigating Settler Colonialism Through Landscape Photography

Returning to Mungo: Navigating Settler Colonialism Through Landscape Photography explores landscape photography as a site-responsive practice, visualising the complex social and cultural narratives embedded in a contested landscape. This practice-led research focuses on Lake Mungo, located on the ancestral lands of the Barkindji, Mutthi Mutthi, and Ngyiampaa peoples in New South Wales. Since the 1960s, Lake Mungo has been a site of competing histories among Traditional Custodians, settlers and scientists. Acknowledging the camera’s historical role in reinforcing settler-colonial narratives, this research disrupts photography’s inherent indexical nature by making physical interventions on photographic surfaces. The outcomes contribute to a developing decolonial landscape photography practice by exploring methodologies for critical engagement with Country as a settler Australian photographer.

Exhibition dates
Thursday 20 February
1pm–5pm

Friday 21 February
10am–12pm

Opening Celebration
Thursday 20 February
5pm

Image: Alice Duncan, Returning to Mungo: Navigating Settler Colonialism Through Landscape Photography