New advances in science and DNA testing have now made it possible to determine ancestral origins which can increase the ability to identify appropriate custodians and enable their return.

This potentially marks a major new chapter for First Nations peoples and repatriation.

In Still life after Penn, artist Damien Shen seeks to highlight this ongoing cultural and ethical concern.

Damien Shen is a South Australian man of Ngarringjeri and Chinese bloodlines.

Still Life, after Penn references the work of American photographer Irving Penn, who – in the late 1970s – created a series of still life portraits of human skulls.

These images were staged in the vein of classical ‘vanitas’ paintings, however, the origins of their original inhabitants is fraught and unresolved.

Shen is drawing attention to the historic culturally violent practices where human remains and bodies were stolen, exhumed or taken from hospital morgues in the dark of night by anthropologists and physicians.

In Australia, Aboriginal remains were removed from graves and burial sites, but also from hospitals, asylums and prisons throughout the 19th century until the late 1940s.

This ‘ethnographic’ approach to human remains dehumanises and disrespects those who have gone before.

The Ngarrindjeri believe that when their people’s remains are not on their own country, then their spirit is wandering.

So unless they are coming home, the spirit will never rest. In this work, Shen is highlighting the important spiritual relationship First Peoples have with the body and its afterlife.

Still Life, after Penn is on display at the Bendigo Art Gallery as part of Gothic Beauty: Victorian Notions of Love, Loss and Spirituality. On until February 10, 2019.  

Jessica Bridgfoot, curator, Bendigo Art Gallery