CIPX Kaurna Miyurna (Critical Indigenous Photographic Exchange with the Kaurna Community)

This tintype photographic series, CIPX Kaurna Miyurna, celebrates important members of the Kaurna community in Tarntanya (Adelaide), on Kaurna Yarta.

These works form part of the Critical Indigenous Photographic Exchange (CIPX), an international Indigenous portraiture project first conceived by Will Wilson, a Diné (Navajo) artist based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. The CIPX project invites Indigenous photographers from around the world to create portraits of members of their local communities using the nineteenth-century tintype process. Kaurna artists Damien Shen and James Tylor have contributed to this contemporary project, which seeks to recontextualise early photographic documentation of Kaurna people produced by European colonists and anthropologists in South Australia during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

These CIPX portraits differ significantly from earlier images of Aboriginal people taken by Europeans. The project is designed to prioritise agency and respect for contemporary Indigenous sitters. Historically, European colonial photographers controlled the visual representation of Aboriginal subjects and retained ownership of the original images.

The CIPX process centres the Indigenous sitter’s autonomy. Participants have control over how they are represented, and the original tintype photographs are returned to the sitter. With the permission of each sitter, Shen and Tylor exhibit reproductions of the works, presented in large scale on aluminium.