Christian Thompson - Hospital Club
We Bury Our Own
'We Bury Our Own’ was the debut London show of leading Australian artist, Christian Thompson. A ground breaking photographic series and video work produced in dialogue with the renowned Pitt Rivers Museum collection, University of Oxford. Previously shown in New York, Oxford, Sydney, Melbourne, Singapore, Virginia and now the final stop at the Hospital Club, Covent Garden. Christian Thompson is an inaugural Charlie Perkins Scholar who recently made history when he became one of the first Aboriginal Australians to be admitted to the University of Oxford in its 900 year existence.
Exhibited internationally, Thompson’s stellar career spans more than a decade and encompasses photography, video, performance, sound and sculpture. He occupies the forefront of and has influenced a new generation of Australian artists whose work, not unexpectedly, explores issues of identity, cultural hybridity and history. Thompson’s artistic practice has been informed by his absorption of a wide range of cultures as an artist growing up in an urban environment in the 1980s and 1990s. His work transcends racial and political boundaries through a sophisticated universality that speaks of the personal human experience and poetic celebration of kinship in a rapid global economy. Combining traditional Australian scenarios with lurid ornamentation and outlandish dress, he has moved into the ‘exploration’ of a new cross-continental theatrically and ‘post’ - colonial identity blending Australian and European imagery and performance. Through dress, song, performance, photographic and video images, Thompson harnesses iconographies from completely different times and cultures, he grafts and blends them into charged and magical hybrids.