Christian Thompson. Photo: Courtesy of Studio Dr Christian Thompson AO, Melbourne
Christian Thompson
PROJECT
Dhanana gaminga (Stand beside her), 2025 was filmed in the Capitol, a theatre built in 1924 in Melbourne’s central business district, this work draws on Christian Thompson’s training in opera as well as his long-term experimentation with music and voice. In the film, opera singer Nina Korbe, a Koa, Kuku Yalanji and Wakka Wakka woman, performs a song composed by Thompson in his Ancestral language, Bidjara. Inspired by the unsuccessful Indigenous Voice referendum of 2023, Thompson reclaims the language, connecting it with music and architecture purpose-built for communal listening. Here, by not offering viewers a translation of the words in language, Thompson aims to emphasise feeling rather than understanding.
The acquisition of this artist’s work is supported by the Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists
ABOUT
Dr Christian Thompson AO is a Bidjara/Irish/Chinese-Australian contemporary artist whose practice spans photography, film, performance, sculpture and sound, often using the body and voice as sites where identity, history and cultural transmission converge. Formally trained as a sculptor, he is recognised for treating language not as a theme but as living material – something carried, sung and insisted upon in public. His four-channel sound installation Burdi Burdi (Fire Fire), 2021, acquired by the NGV, centred on his father’s Bidjara language, which is officially classified as severely endangered. For Thompson, speaking or singing even a single word resists its disappearance and positions the gallery as an active archive of living culture.
As well as exploring Thompson’s personal experiences of the Bidjara language, his works call for the revitalisation of First Nations languages, bringing forward 60,000 years of narrative and experiences embedded in voice and the languages of what Thompson describes as ‘pre-invasion Australia’.
Thompson’s work has been exhibited internationally over more than two decades. In 2010 he became the first Aboriginal Australian admitted to Oxford University. A research affiliate at the Pitt Rivers Museum, he holds a PhD (Fine Art) from Trinity College, University of Oxford, as well as degrees in theatre, sculpture and fine art. He is currently Associate Professor and Vice-Chancellor’s Senior Indigenous Research Fellow at RMIT University, Melbourne.His work is held in major collections including the Museum of Contemporary Art and Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Queensland Art Gallery and the University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane; and the Aboriginal Art Museum, Utrecht, the Netherlands. In 2018 he was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia for his service to the visual arts.