‘Very totemic and very Aboriginal’: Australia’s entry at Venice Biennale is a family tree going back 65,000 years

Archie Moore’s meticulous genealogy, kith and kin, is a memorial to Indigenous lives lost – but it’s also about global common humanity

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For the past two months, in the quiet, darkened room of the Australia pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Bigambul-Kamilaroi artist Archie Moore has been drawing by hand in chalk a vast and meticulous genealogy.

But Moore’s work, kith and kin – Australia’s official entry in the 2024 Venice Biennale, which opened this week with the theme “Foreigners everywhere” – is about much more, and its grand scope reveals itself slowly.