Introduction: Artists confronting the violence of denial in Australia

In this critical introduction, co-editors Genevieve Grieves and Amy Spiers describe a settler Australian memorial landscape that continues to celebrate colonisers while remaining silent about their theft and mass murder, as First Peoples repeatedly call for truth-telling about Australia’s troubling foundations in violence. Positioning and grounding their separate research practices, Grieves and Spiers continue by identifying that the realm of art and culture has become a space to remember and mourn the profound loss of life caused by invasion and colonisation in the absence of official commemorations. It is through the spaces of art that First Nations artists powerfully resist historical amnesia and tell the truth about Australia’s past, providing spaces of healing through the long overdue recognition of painful events. The chapter also describes Grieves’ research that informs this edited collection, and the exhibition she curated, The Violence of Denial (2017), that considered the deeply restorative, place-based creative practices of First Nations artists Vicki Couzens, Julie Gough, r e a and Dianne Jones that not only disclose colonial injustices, but also heal sites of violence and revive First Peoples cultural futures.