The Gallery’s 2022 exhibition FACELESS: Transforming Identity, Blak/Black Artists from North Australia, Africa and the African Diaspora, was part of a series of exhibitions that explored cross-cultural dialogues between First Nations artists from around the world as they sought to redefine issues of history, place, culture and traditions.

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.

FACELESS Transforming Identity: Blak/Black Artists from North Australia, Africa and the African Diaspora challenged established notions of identity and explored ways in which interpretations of identity can be manipulated or redefined by blak/black artists through a revisioning of the face using devices such as embellishment, erasure, and disguise.

Working closely with fifteen North Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists and ten African and African Diaspora artists, Cairns Art Gallery curated this ground-breaking exhibition which brought together newly commissioned and loaned works across a range of art forms and media. For artists in the exhibition the physicality of the face, is a device for redefining identity within particular social, cultural, and political frameworks and contexts, to offer new meanings and interpretations.

To offer alternative readings for the work of artists included in the exhibition, the Gallery commissioned two writers to contribute essays for the exhibition publication.

In her essay, More than the masks we wear, Dr Chelsea Watego (formerly Bond), a professor of Indigenous health at Queensland University of Technology examined multiple interpretations for works by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists included in the exhibition.

Renée Mussai, the Senior Curator and Head of Curatorial & Collections at Autograph, London, guest curator and former fellow at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University explored complex readings of history and the relation of politics to identity and blackness, to ‘navigate the multiple frontlines of colour, both on the African continent and in its diaspora’.

Artists represented in the exhibition delved into narratives of the black/blak experience, and by removing, erasing, or manipulating the face as a codified marker of identity they demonstrated that, in the words of Chelsea Watego Bond, ‘to be faceless is not by any means to be powerless.’