The Archibald is coming to the Northern Rivers. Australia's most coveted portrait prize, won this year by Western Arrente artist, Vincent Namatjira, for a portrait of himself alongside champion footballer Adam Goodes titled "Stand Strong For Who You Are", opens at the Tweed Regional Gallery in January.
Namatjira, a super talented artist and deserving winner, is a the first ever indigenous artist to take out the award, joining another indigenous painter, Meyne Wyatt, who snared the Packing Room prize. Overall, the Archibald 2020 was characterised by unprecedented diversity, welcome during a year when issues around race and culture have been so prevalent.
Among the other finalists is a portrait I painted of the Kurdish Iranian writer and journalist, Behrouz Boochani, who was held captive by the Australian Federal government for over six years as a refugee on Manus Island in PNG.
Boochani, finally free and living in New Zealand, symbolizes more than any other individual, the struggle for a more humane and compassionate approach to the way this country treats those who arrive here seeking our protection from persecution and conflict.
While recognized biggest art competition, the Archibald also transcends the art world, inhabiting a prominent place in our nation's broader cultural landscape. During the past 99 years, the prize has featured many of our greatest painters, while also providing a record of social history, singling out individuals who have made valuable, often inspirational contributions to Australian public life and society.
That Boochani's portrait will hang in the same spaces occupied by Prime Ministers, Indigenous leaders, scientists, academics and our nation's leading artists, writers and cultural icons is a measure of the significant place he's cemented in our recent history, not to mention a source of some obvious irony, given that he's achieved this despite never even setting foot on the mainland.
I've known Boochani since 2018, when he collaborated on a documentary I produced about the Manus detention centre. His story is remarkable.
When he arrived on Christmas Island as an asylum seeker in mid-2013, fleeing persecution in Iran, he had just turned 29. In the years that followed, while enduring the brutal, inhumane treatment inflicted upon thousands of men women and children transferred to Nauru and Manus Island under the government's offshore processing regime, Boochani produced an inordinate body of work.
His astonishing literary achievement, "No Friend But The Mountains: Writing From Manus Prison", (written via a series of secret text messages) was awarded Australia's richest writing prize in 2019. While this propelled him into the consciousness of many people for the first time, Boochani should be understood as more than just as a supremely talented writer. The energy he directed into his work was broad and staggeringly productive. He is also a filmmaker, a poet, a journalist, an academic and collaborated in numerous other projects including theatre, documentaries and video installations.
The position he occupies now is the product of a creative, multi-disciplinary universe that he built out of nothing from the ground up: working alone, independent of organisations or political affiliations, and strictly faithful to his own voice under the horrendous conditions he shared with every other innocent human being who was consigned offshore.
Five years ago, shut away on Manus, what he'd produced hadn't yet found an avenue to the wider world. Undeterred, he laboured relentlessly, building an ever-expanding world to advance his struggle. Boochani recognized that in his captivity, art was both a deep expression of humanity and a powerful act of resistance.
Through his work across so many disciplines, he continually strived to expose the malevolence of the policy and above everything else, to humanise the plight of those held with him that the Federal government perpetually sought to keep invisible.
Boochani challenged the political narrative around refugees, forging a new way for other refugees and asylum seekers to also speak out and resist through their own art. His contribution is also fundamentally historical: a crucial record of one of our nation's darkest and as yet unfinished chapters.
Boochani's work is a gift: delivered to inspire us to be the best version of ourselves as a society through recognising our shared humanity; and it was given without malice, despite all that we perpetrated upon him. It should not be squandered.
Boochani does not view himself as a victim. Through his work, he tirelessly fought against the system that tried to break and defeat him. But he was not defeated. In fact, he inspired and mobilised people everywhere. The government aimed to humiliate Boochani, but in my view, it was he who humiliated them. It was an honour to paint him.