THE STARS

A very significant election, plus the Cup and the Brio

★★★★★ Juparnta Ngattu Minjinypa Iconocrisis

The Tennant Creek Brio’s first major retrospective is an explosive jumble of an exhibition. ACCA is overflowing with reptiles, green avengers, poking red tongues, bearded men, overturned oil barrels, overwritten mining maps, video footage of town and Country, crumpled car bonnets and car doors painted with splodgy stripes, piles of bricks, red dirt, listerine green walls, and a metres-high guardian angel with wings formed from two busted, dirt-encrusted Shell signs. It’s like nothing we've ever seen on the Southbank. The Brio are “monsters of energy,” as Tristen Harwood writes in a recent Memo feature. Speaking in the cross-cultural spirit of the title, which combines Warumungu, Warlpiri, and English words, Juparnta Ngattu Minjinypa Iconocrisis kind of reminded us of Studio Ghibli’s Spirited Away. You know that scene in the bathhouse when Chihiro feeds No-Face the magical nugget that forces him to purge all the stuff he’s consumed in his quest for fulfilment and he starts spewing out furniture and ceramic bowls and frogs in a thick, black sludge? ACCA seems like the receptacle for a great purging. It's as though the Brio have deposited in central Melbourne a brightly-coloured deluge of detritus, the wreckage left by the poisonous ills of colonial violence and rapacious mining. “‘Please’ clean up the mess…” a painted inscription reads. “This is Aboriginal land.” One room in the exhibition looks like a dystopian decolonial casino—the body of a pokie machine has been pierced through and through from all angles by pointy wooden spears. (The stolen pokies are still missing, if you see them round.) The show closes in two weeks. Don't miss it!