Dean Cross

Dean Cross is a Worimi artist and curator whose multidisciplinary practice spans performance, installation, photography, sculpture and painting. His work resists easy categorisation, reflecting a commitment to self-determination and a refusal of external validation. It neither seeks comfort nor conforms to expectations of what ‘Aboriginal art’ should be.

In Living Memory and the accompanying photographs make their Australian debut at the NGV. The work is a melancholic meditation on time, lineage and emotional memory. Cross is the first man in his family not to enlist in military service, breaking a chain of duty that had endured for over 145 years. This personal rupture underpins the work’s emotional force.

Commissioned by the National WWI Museum and Memorial in Kansas City, Missouri, In Living Memory was created for an international audience, yet Cross chose to craft a deeply personal response. The two-channel video sees him perform improvised dance informed by what he calls ‘blood memory’: the genetic and spiritual inheritances passed down through generations. The work becomes a speculative act – an attempt to access the layered, often contradictory aspects of his identity, suspended between ancestors who were both coloniser and colonised. This invites us to consider how past and present coalesce, what parts of our own identity remain untold, or perhaps unknowable.