Townsville-born artist Tony Albert has won the $50,000 Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award (NATSIAA) with his photographic portrait series, "We Can Be Heroes". It is the first time since the annual awards were established in 1984 that a photographic work has won the prize.
Albert's work comprises 20 photographs arranged in a grid like pattern showing young Aboriginal men staring defiantly at the camera, shirtless and with red bullseyes painted on their chests.
The work was inspired by the controversial police shooting of two aboriginal boys, aged 14 and 17, in Kings Cross in 2012, after the car they were joyriding in mounted the footpath and hit a pedestrian. The incident sparked protests and it was at one of these protests that Albert saw friends of the teenage boys, shirtless, with targets drawn on their bodies.
“It was incredibly profound for young people to make such a statement,” Albert told The Sydney Morning Herald.
The young men whose portraits appear in the series are from Kirinari Aboriginal Hostel in Sydney.
"These 20 uniformly photographed young men with a red target painted on their bare chests are defiant, proud and strong," says the NATSIAA website. "Despite being presented quite literally as 'moving targets', they each stand resolute, bathed in a pool of warm light and surrounded by darkness. Collectively these deeply beautiful portraits portray the image of proud young men as they defiantly approach their adulthood...This work focuses on the consequences of dispossession and racism for Aboriginal men but carries a positive message – that together everyone can be a hero."
The National Aboriginal Art Award was established in 1984 by the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, "to recognise the important contribution made by Indigenous artists and to promote appreciation and understanding of the quality and diversity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island art from Indigenous artists throughout Australia."
Image by Tony Albert.
