High-profile artists are calling for the Museum of Old and New Art and its festivals, Dark Mofo and Mona Foma, to undertake a suite of actions including mandatory cultural awareness training and reparations in the form of purchasing Indigenous art in response to a widely condemned and since-cancelled proposed artwork that would immerse a Union Jack flag in the donated blood of Indigenous people.
First Nations artists and performers including Reko Rennie (Kamilaroi), Tony Albert (Girramay and Kuku Yalanji), Brook Andrew (Wiradjuri), Otis Hope Carey (Gumbaynggirr and Bundjalung) and the National Gallery of Victoria’s curator of Indigenous art, Myles Russell-Cook (Wotjobaluk), are among more than 2,000 people who have signed a pledge on Change.org and Instagram, stating they refuse to work with the Museum of Old and New Art and its festivals, Dark Mofo and Mona Foma, until it performs a series of “organisational reforms”.
Dark Mofo announced on Tuesday afternoon that it had cancelled Santiago Sierra’s artwork, Union Flag, which would have seen the British flag immersed in the blood of First Nations peoples colonised by Britain. Union Flag was scheduled to feature at the annual winter festival this year.
“We made a mistake, and take full responsibility. The project will be cancelled. We apologise to all First Nations people for any hurt that has been caused. We are sorry,” the Dark Mofo director, Leigh Carmichael, said in a statement.
Meanwhile, the Trawlwoolway/Plangermaireener artist Jamie Graham-Blair was circulating a petition on Instagram and Change.org, calling for artists to boycott all three major arms of the arts organisation helmed by the arts patron and professional gambler David Walsh.
The petition calls on artists to refuse to work with Mona museum, the winter arts festival Dark Mofo and the summer music and art festival Mona Foma “until there are organisational reforms to be respectful to First Peoples, our culture and our histories”.
“We no longer believe that your organisations are safe and respectful working environments for First Australian artists, arts curators and arts workers,” the petition says. “Until these requirements are addressed and fulfilled by the MONA organisations, the signatories of the document will not work with the organisations in any capacity.”
Signatories also include the musicians Kira Puru, L-Fresh the Lion, Mo’Ju, and the feminist writer Clementine Ford.
The petition makes six demands of the Tasmanian institution as a whole, including that it apologise for “past events that have negatively affected First Peoples” and that it appoints a First Peoples advisory board and develops a reconciliation action plan.
It calls upon the organisation to subsequently appoint First Nations people to curatorial roles at each arm, and “commit to funding more pakana (Tasmanian Aboriginal people’s) artworks as reparations for the damage you have already done”.
It also requests that all staff at Mona, Mona Foma and Dark Mofo, its directors and David Walsh himself “undertake mandatory cultural awareness training and decolonisation workshops”.
Some Mona staff, however – including some in leadership roles within the organisation – had already been voicing their concerns about the project, including Mona Foma’s artistic director, Brian Ritchie, who criticised the commission and distanced his festival from Dark Mofo on Facebook; and the Mona curator Emma Pike, who collected staff signatures on a letter calling Union Flag “tone-deaf to the current fights for a treaty, equality, for Aboriginal-led conversations, and ultimately reconciliation”, which she then sent to Walsh.
Pike told Guardian Australia that the letter was sent to Mona’s owner on Tuesday morning, before the commission was cancelled that afternoon.
“The letter wasn’t signed by a huge number of staff (because of the time restraints), but it was signed by key staff members whose opinions I knew David greatly respected and valued and to whom he had listened to before,” she says. “I know many more Mona/Mona Foma staff are disappointed they didn’t have the opportunity to sign.”
Walsh referred directly to the letter in a blog post on Tuesday in which he addressed the controversy and apologised for commissioning the work.
“I should not sway at the whim of criticism. But neither should I be impervious to it. I’m here, trying to learn from it,” he wrote. “I am the archetypal beneficiary of colonialism. And I’ve caught myself using that as an excuse for my ignorance. Do I ever have the right to express an opinion (even through art) when experience is lacking? I believe I do. But my ignorance does not empower me.
“I’m trying to understand, now, how I thought that Sierra’s work was worth staging. It’s going to offend someone (apparently, nearly everyone), but who could benefit? It wouldn’t be aesthetically powerful. And even that measly justification for malfeasance and mediocrity, the greater good, doesn’t apply here.”
After Dark Mofo cancelled Sierra’s artwork, the artist posted an image tile to Facebook that said “Often the slave defends the symbols of the master”, which many assumed to be a response to the outcry.
The petition also alleges that Aboriginal heritage sites were damaged during the construction of the Mona museum itself, which sits on the banks of the Derwent River, just outside of Hobart. Guardian Australia has approached Dark Mofo, Mona and Mona Foma for comment.
