The Indigenous Uncanny: Accounting For Ghosts in Recent Indigenous Australian Experimental Media

This essay departs from Freud's 1919 essay, Das Unheimliche (The Uncanny), exploring the Indigenous uncanny instantiated in recent works that traffic in ghostly encounters, by well-known Australian Indigenous artists: (1) Tracey Moffatt's Night Spirits photographs from her 2013 show, Spirit Landscapes, and The White Ghosts Sailed In, from her solo show, My Horizon (2017 Venice Biennale); (2) Warwick Thornton's 2013 experimental documentary, The Darkside, based on Indigenous ghost stories, and his 2015 show The Way of the Ngangkari. These works create a powerful aesthetic that acknowledges the displacement of Aboriginal people during European settlement as well as long-standing ancestral connections.