Exhibition texts

The painting shows a view into a mangrove forest along the coast near Gimuy/Cairns in North Queensland, Australia, where Boyd grew up. The source image of this painting is a photograph by Boyd’s nephew. Mangroves live on coastlines between the high and low tidelines. Their roots grow below and above the water’s surface. Once a seed falls into the water it floats until it finds solid ground to grow new roots. The dense canopy of interlacing branches makes it impossible to discern single branches; similarly, the tree’s shoreline position unsettles the division between land and water.
The mangrove can be seen as a symbol for Boyd’s approach to interconnecting narratives that travel through time and space. It also reflects his painting technique that oscillates between what is seen and what is protected from view.

The source of this painting is a 1961 photograph of Queen Elizabeth II dancing at a ball with Ghana’s president Kwame Nkrumah, originally printed in the London newspaper The Times. The British monarch visited Nkrumah in the capital Accra four years after Ghana gained independence from British rule and became part of the British Commonwealth. During the Cold War, US and British governments were concerned about Nkrumah’s socialist leanings and feared he would ally Ghana with the Soviet Union.
The photograph of two heads of state dancing together was widely circulated in the media. It was politically instrumentalised by the British government to portray their meeting in Ghana as a victory for the US and Britain, away from the threat of Soviet alliances.

In his early No Beard series (2005–2009), Boyd reworked portraits of colonial instigators. Here, Boyd appropriated a portrait of botanist Joseph Banks, painted by Thomas Phillips in 1810 and held by the National Portrait Gallery in London. Banks accompanied James Cook in his HMS Endeavour voyage.
In the late 18th century, following Banks’ instructions, breadfruit plants were transported from Tahiti to British colonies in the Caribbean to provide cheap food for enslaved people working in British plantations. Here, Banks poses next to a decapitated head floating in a specimen jar: a self-portrait of Boyd himself. The head references Pemulwuy, a Bidjigal leader and key figure in the First Nations resistance against colonial rule on Gadigal and Wangal Country, Sydney. After being killed by the British in 1802, Pemulwuy’s decapitated head was sent to Banks in London.

This is a portrait of Édouard Glissant, a philosopher and poet from Martinique. Glissant is known for his concept of “the right to opacity and difference.” Through imperialism and colonialism, Western ideas of transparency were imposed around the world. For colonised or formerly colonised peoples, however, transparency often led to categorisation and stereotyping. Instead, Glissant proposed a model of global exchange that does not erase cultural diversity but embraces difference.
Glissant’s thinking has come to be an important reference for Boyd. In his painting, light and darkness are valued equally. By focusing on the translucent dots – which the artist terms “lenses” – as well as the dark spaces in between, Boyd suggests that knowledge is fluid and fragmentary.

In his work, Boyd references his ni-Vanuatu heritage, as well as the trade of enslaved people that occurred between Vanuatu and Australia. The history of slavery has long been omitted from dominant narratives about the colonisation of the Australia-Great Ocean region. Boyd’s great-great grandfather was among those brought from Pentecost Island, Vanuatu, to North Queensland, Australia, in the late 19th century to work on sugarcane plantations.
This painting is based on a sand drawing from the Vanuatu archipelago, where such drawings are used to communicate and transmit knowledge amongst the multiple communities inhabiting the archipelago’s islands.
Boyd came across the Vanuatuan sand drawings on the internet, where he also found images taken by an anthropologist who added lines and numbers to the patterns of the sand drawings with the ambition to decode their structure and meaning.

This painting is based on a found academic drawing of the Apollo Belvedere, an antique marble sculpture housed in the Vatican Museums in Rome.
Boyd worked deliberately from this drawing, which represents the figure’s proportions as ideal, in order to shed light on the ways visual iconographies travel through space and time: the drawing makes accessible an image to someone who has not seen the sculpture in person. Moreover, it shows how iconography outlasts antiquity and extends to classicism and neo-classicism and beyond.

As part of his exhibition RAINBOW SERPENT (VERSION), Daniel Boyd engulfed the building architecture in a second skin layered over the atrium and first floor windows. The atrium’s floor is covered in mirrors reflecting the existing architecture in a fragmented, everchanging image.
The installation also reflects the Gropius Bau’s past. The building was heavily damaged during a bombing raid in 1945. The traces of this attack were deliberately left visible in the course of the building’s reconstruction.
Boyd conceived this installation as a stage for a programme that plays out over the time span of the exhibition.