TONY ALBERT, You Wreck Me #59, 2020

TONY ALBERT Girramay/Yidinji/Kuku Yalanji languages, born 1981 You Wreck Me #59, 2020 printed photographs and vintage Captain Cook ephemera on archival paper 28.5 x 38.5 cm; 40.5 x 49.5 cm (framed) bears Sullivan & Strumpf cataloguing label verso PROVENANCE Sullivan & Strumpf, New South Wales, Cat No. TA2020-209 Private Collection, New South Wales ILLUSTRATED Tony Albert: Not a Souvenir, Thames and Hudson Australia, 2026, p.160 EXHIBITED You Wreck Me, 2 - 9 July 2020, Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), Hobart, Tasmania Tony Albert's practice operates as a sustained act of demolition, taking direct aim at the visual apparatus of Australian racism. His work exposes how Australian culture has historically approached First Nations peoples on selective terms: absorbing their bodies, imagery, and cultural motifs into everyday objects while requiring no genuine encounter with Indigenous people themselves. Against this pattern of extraction, Albert asserts identity, dignity, and individuality for First Nations subjects, refusing the token status assigned to them across decades of settler visual culture. You Wreck Me extends the critique previously trained on First Fleet iconography and monuments to Captain Cook, to the domestic clutter of colonial nostalgia. Here, Albert's target shrinks in scale but not in significance: vintage Federal matchstick boxes decorated with "Aboriginalia," the kitsch imagery that once rendered Aboriginal people quaint, decorative, and safely distant. The title's nod to Miley Cyrus' Wrecking Ball supplies both method and tone, transforming solemn critique into gleeful demolition. Laughter becomes the mechanism of dismantling: the paternalistic gaze embedded in these objects is toppled from the status of collectible kitsch to something closer to questionable junk, its authority undone as much by ridicule as by argument. 'Wrecking Ball': https://vimeo.com/428332201 © TONY ALBERT / Copyright Agency, 2026

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