Sally Gabori, Aboriginal memory in color at the Fondation Cartier

On the picture rails of the Cartier Foundation in Paris, large abstract canvases, bright, dazzling, vibrant colors. It’s hard to imagine that they were painted by an 80-year-old Aboriginal lady who had never touched a paintbrush before. They represent the vanished world of Sally Gabori.

Her real name is Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori. ” Mirdidingkingathi means ” who was born in Mirdidingki ”, a place located in the south of Bentinck Island, in the north of Australia. ” Juwarnda refers to the dolphin, his totemic animal, as Isabelle Gaudefroy, artistic director of the Cartier Foundation, tells us.

Exile as a legacy

Sally Gabori was born around 1924, she belongs to the Kaiadilt people, one of the last to have come into contact with European settlers. She was 24 years old when she was evacuated from her island, following a cyclone, to a Presbyterian mission on the neighboring island of Mornington.

From now on, it is forbidden to speak Kayardilt, his native language, and parents are separated from children. A forced exile, which radically cuts off an entire people from its culture and its traditions. Sally Gabori will only be able to return home when indigenous territorial rights begin to be recognized from the 1990s.

Several canvases bear the name ” Nyinyilki “, a very specific place on Bentinck Island, explains Juliette Lecorne, curator of the exhibition. ” A place associated with the political struggle of the Kaiadilt people for the recognition of rights to their land. From the 1980s a movement for the recognition of Aboriginal land rights unfolded in Australia and from the 1990s a “Outstation“, a basic encampment that will allow the Kaiadilt – who are still isolated on Mornington Island – to return more frequently to Bentinck Island, in order to be able to reconnect with this land. »

Painting by chance and with frenzy

During the last nine years of her life, Sally Gabori would paint more than 2,000 canvases, a compulsive work, a mental mapping of places and a celebration of the landscapes of her native island as well as members of her family. She has most often depicted Dibirdibi, a celebration of the founding creation myths of Bentinck Island which separated from the Australian mainland 6,000 years ago.

Dibirdibi is a fish ancestor who would have shaped the island, a spiritual entity, associated with her husband, Pat Gabori, of whom she is the second wife and with whom she had eleven children. Several of his paintings also bear the name of Thundi, the sacred place of his father’s birth.

“ The movements and mutations of color on the canvases echo the climatological and meteorological movements of Bentinck Island such as the “Morning Glories“, these cylindrical clouds which unfold over kilometers and which can be found in certain movements of his paintings “says Juliette Lecorne.

Sally Gabori holds her brush in her clenched fist and paints her acrylic touches on a base coat that is not yet dry, the colors then begin to change and allow her to show movements of the wind, reverberations of light in water or sky. She will also produce several works, with other women who, like her, have experienced exile. Two large collaborative canvases, more than six meters long, made the trip to Paris.

Sally Gabori is today considered one of Australia’s greatest contemporary painters. His unique work in shimmering colors has no apparent connection with other aesthetic currents, particularly within Aboriginal painting.

Her paintings are the fruit of her memories, of places as she knew them and lived them before her exile and after her return. Paths, rivers, mountains, or even, in the form of wide arcs of black circles, traditional kaiadilt fish traps.

► Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori exhibition, until November 6, 2022 at the Cartier Foundation