AustLit

Exhibited at the Australian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, 2017. Moffatt was the first Indigenous Australian artist to represent her country at the Venice Biennale since 1997. The exhibit included two series of photographs and two videos.

An experimental short film that subverts the 'male gaze' through its objectification of men, Heaven zeros in on the surfing culture and, in particular, on several dozen good-looking, muscular surfers changing into or out of their swimming trunks.

Further Reference:

Natalya Lusty, 'Masculinity and Whiteness in Tracey Moffatt's Heaven'.

(http://www.art-museum.unimelb.edu.au/resources.ashx/events.transcripts/9/PDF/41E12FE901ADF3E55A17D72D8FF31490/Lusty.pdf)

Isabelle Aeby Papaloïzos, 'Heaven 1997' in New Media Encyclopedia.

(http://www.newmedia-art.org/cgi-bin/show-oeu.asp?ID=O0019361&lg=GBR)

A trilogy of short stories in which characters are haunted by memories, spirits and ghosts, and bewitched by the past. 'BeDevil captures the allusive quality of parochial, local, familial ghost stories, the sort of stories that are passed down through generations, that are repeated and embroidered upon so that eventually they are woven into quotidian discourse and a passing reference can evoke a complex texture of ghostliness' (Lesley Stern, Photofile).

A middle-aged Aboriginal woman nurses her old white mother. During her tending of the old woman, she expresses her frustrations and previously suppressed anger, her own need for warmth and love, and her personal loneliness. Her memories and dreams invade her nerve-fraying routine until the old woman dies and she begins to experience an immense sense of loss.

In the ABC Radio National program, It's Not A Race in May 2017, Marcia Langton notes that Night Cries is the retelling of Jedda as a horror story.

An experimental narrative which departs from realist conventions by suggesting connections and differences in the relationship between Aboriginal women and European men in the early years of settlement and in contemporary Sydney, Nice Coloured Girls is also 'a ground-breaking film stylistically and thematically. The audience is left to question history, in particular the reliability of primary sources. The absence of the Aboriginal point of view in Australia's "history" becomes glaringly obvious as we are left to question the nature of traditional representations of Aborigines. As Australians, Aboriginal people have been marginalized and stereotyped but Moffatt who is a young, contemporary Aboriginal Australian offers an Aboriginal perspective through her work and questions dominant representations which have excluded Aborigines (or offered unrealistic images of them)' (French, 'An Analysis of Nice Coloured Girls', q.v.).