The Aboriginal Robot

At first glance, the country of THE ABORIGINAL ROBOT series seems to have been entirely abstracted into a settler colony’s factor of production.

Inputs = Native Land + Labour + Native Elimination + Capital

One canvas grids up the country as per map into a territory for extraction and evisceration. Another shows an oil or gas rig, its drill bit dripping gore. The incarnadine landscapes are assuredly Surrealist (think Leonara Carrington rather than Dalí) and also remindful of Boe’s landscapes responding to the 2020 bushfires on K’gari in her 2021 exhibition K’gari means paradise in Butchulla. But these works are more deathful and more pitilessly presentist in their representation of our hi-tech doom-loop of subjection and domination. The land is dying, not fructifying. There’s nothing to eat. On the plate of one blak figure, loaves have turned to stones. 

Output = secular Hell

The settler governments realise how suicidal has been their genocide of native Dreaming. So they construct THE ABORIGINAL ROBOT – THE DREAMING MACHINE, its monitor-head blinking the colour bars of a classic TV test card. They envision, presumably, it will docilely ‘care for country’, fix the mess, be a harmless Bushcare automaton. But THE ABORIGINAL ROBOT comes to THE UNDERSTANDING of what its brutal settler inventors have wrought, and then – mobilising the possibilities of political antagonism in a sci-fi trope that goes back to Karel Čapek’s 1920 play of a machinic uprising, R.U.R., in which the word ‘robot’ first appeared – it breaks its programming and ‘begins a revolution’. This is non-imperial art. It is unmortgaged to any pre-cast theory. It is also a forward-turn in Boe’s own work, which has up till now been preoccupied with history, whether national pasts (e.g., Native Troopers, black trackers), the tradition of Australian art (e.g., Nolan), or family memory. But this work imagines a future where present Operating Systems break down. It looks forward to a new UNDERSTANDING on colonised Earth. That would not mean the end of history. It is the condition of possibility for any more history.  

– William Holbrook, 2024

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We are thrilled to present Mia Boe's first exhibition with Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in a compelling series of 16 paintings that unfold around the gallery walls like a storyboard for a science fiction novel. Mapping out the narrative arc and drawing aesthetic inspiration from seminal science fiction films such as Blade Runner and 2001: A Space Odyssey, Boe seamlessly fuses these influences with her personal interpretations of the Australian landscape. Drawing inspiration from her interest in science fiction, literature and cinema, the storyline of Boe's tale of a dystopian future unfolds with a ravaged landscape, depleted from years of human impact. The government's response is to create an AI Robot imbued with the wisdom of Aboriginal land management. As the Robot delves into the history of those who exploited and profited from the land, it sparks a revolutionary upheaval.