Turrangka...in the shadows

Multi-disciplinary artist James Tylor combines historical and contemporary photographic processes to explore his Nunga (Kaurna Miyurna), Māori (Te Arawa) and European ancestry. This survey of a decade of his practice brings together daguerreotypes, digital photographic series, hand-made Kaurna cultural objects, and furniture. The exhibition title, drawn from a Kaurna word, reflects Tylor's ongoing engagement with his Indigenous language—turra translates to shadow, reflection, image, and mirror. Tylor's practice centres on photographic intervention, systematically altering readings of Country by excising information from prints or inscribing language and place-names onto daguerreotypes. He recreates Kaurna cultural artefacts, architecture, and ephemera using antiquated analogue processes including Becquerel daguerreotypes and hand-tinting, generating a new archive of pseudo-historical images that highlight absences from colonial Australia's visual record. These strategies examine the suppression and erasure of Aboriginal cultural history through colonialism's ongoing legacy. For Tylor, learning Kaurna language and reviving culture on Country constitute acts of repatriation.