D Harding: We breathe together

18.11.2022 - 08.01.2023

D Harding: We breathe together

Bergen Kunsthall is proud to present the first large-scale solo presentation by the artist D Harding in Europe. Based in Brisbane, Australia, Harding has shown in recent years in numerous large-scale international exhibitions. In many of these works, Harding used visual and social languages of their native communities, such as stencilling, to inquire about the complex and layered cultural heritage and aesthetic histories as a cultural continuum extended into the realms of international, contemporary art. Harding’s work seeks new forms for sharing materials and knowledge, often paying homage to or involving family members.

For the exhibition at Bergen Kunsthall, Harding’s first large-scale solo exhibition outside of Australia, the question of transfer and, in a literal sense, transport becomes a conceptual focus. Some of the works in the exhibition are made with colours painted on paper and directly on the wall. The pigments used for these paintings are ochres sourced from the soil, which can have a spiritual dimension. Harding transported some of the ochres in woollen felt blankets made in homage to their ancestor’s cloaks made of possum skin. Saturated with earth pigments and gum Arabic, these felt works become vessels carrying the pigments worldwide. Once rehydrated, the wool revives and releases its contents. The paintings are site specifically produced and laden with the lands of Harding’s ancestors. Materials displayed in vitrines further explore the role of ochres bought from a global circulation of pigments, in which the materials take on different commercial meanings.

While Harding’s works seek direct connections to traditions in Aboriginal cultures in many ways, it is also mindful of maintaining protection and care and working against a tendency to exoticise or exploit ownership of a tradition. In the past, Harding frequently concealed parts of initial references or elements drawn from traditional techniques by imposing them with more abstract visual formats, in some works on canvas reminding of colour field painting, for example, and playfully touching on Western artistic traditions.

One of the works of the exhibition in Bergen, which also lent the title to the show, We breathe together (2017/2021), presents pure pigments—ochre, charcoal, and synthetic pigment. All with importance within cultural traditions of Harding’s ancestry—on a long line of glass plates of the same size. What at first looks like a Minimalist work can be understood, with more information, as a map of territories, represented through materials of significance for these, and invites us into an exploration of the artist’s pigments as colour and matter.

D Harding was born in 1982 in Moranbah on the lands of the Barada Barna people (Australia). They live and work in Brisbane on the territories of the Turrbal and Jagera people. Recent exhibitions include documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel (2017), ARS22 at Kiasma–Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, Reclaim the Earth at Palais de Tokyo in Paris and the 23rd Biennale of Sydney (all 2022).