The Australian Aboriginal art project Las Puertas de Yuendumu, presented by the Australian Embassy in collaboration with Casa Asía and the Network of Municipal Public Libraries of Madrid, opens today at the Biblioteca Pública Municipal Iván de Vargas (Calle San Justo, 5).
This exhibition offers visitors a unique opportunity to discover the Australian indigenous reality through 20 informative panels that show the history of one of Australia’s greatest cultural and artistic treasures. For at least 65,000 years, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have given voice to the Dreaming stories, songs and knowledge to maintain the strength of Australia’s Indigenous culture as the oldest on the planet. The Yuendumu gates represent one of Australia’s greatest cultural and artistic treasures. They are the translation of Warlpiri ritual aesthetics into the public realm, the beginnings of contemporary Warlpiri art and an intimate gesture of care from the desert elders to their children. Yuendumu is a small community of less than 1,000 people in central Australia, about 300 km northwest of Alice Springs, made up mostly of Warlpiri and Anmatyerr Aboriginal people.
When the Yuendumu Gates were painted in 1984, a generation of young people were the first to be schooled in a Western education system. Yuendumu elders worried that these children would not fully connect with the new system. They wondered: How can we bridge the gap between our traditional Aboriginal way of life and this Australia around us? How can we get our sons and daughters to embrace Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal culture together in their education? In response to these questions, they decided to paint the Warlpiri education system, the Jukurrpa, on the school gates. The Jukurrpa translates as “Dreaming” or “Dreamtime” and is the Warlpiri’s period of creation.
In October 1984, photographer Gerry Orkin of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies (now AIATSIS) spent several days documenting the 30 school gates. His photographs, which are featured in this project, show the gates in their original state. In 1995, members of the Yuendumu school committee and the artists who formed the Warlukurlangu co-operative approached the South Australia Museum about acquiring the doors. The museum undertook to conserve them, with a promise to display them within its walls and beyond.
