Continental Drift: Black / blak art from South Africa and north Australia was presented by Cairns Art Gallery in 2018. It was the first in a series of exhibitions the Gallery held that explored complex narratives and histories relating to race and representation, which are shared by Australian Indigenous artists from Queensland and artists from other cultural backgrounds.

This exhibition forms part of the Cairns Art Gallery online First Nations Research Archive developed as part of the Gallery’s online Legacy Archive produced to celebrate the Gallery’s 30th anniversary.

While north Australia and South Africa have different histories, British colonisation had dramatic effects on their black peoples, many of which continue to be experienced today. The exhibition aimed to challenge the uncomfortable truths that surround the colonisation of Australia and South Africa and how these truths have impacted on and shaped the construction of contemporary black/blak personhood.

Australia and South Africa have a shared but different experience of British colonisation, and in this exhibition, it is the way that artists from both countries have chosen to interrogate and interpret these experiences that is most revealing and challenging.

The decision to focus on Indigenous Australian artists living in the north of the country who have cultural connections to Queensland, related to the Gallery’s research interests and the specific conditions of colonisation that prevailed in Queensland. However, the reality of colonisation and the resulting experience of ‘unbelonging’ in one’s own country has resonance for all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists in Australia.

Other exhibitions from this series exploring artistic cross-cultural dialogues between First Nation artists living and working in Far North Australia and artists who live and work in other regions within the world’s tropic zone are Ritual: The past in the present, North Australian and Asia Pacific Art in 2021, and Faceless: Transforming Identity in 2022.