{"id":2967,"date":"2026-04-15T11:04:30","date_gmt":"2026-04-15T03:04:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/jcg\/?post_type=exhibitions&p=2967"},"modified":"2026-04-16T09:23:56","modified_gmt":"2026-04-16T01:23:56","slug":"reko-rennie-oa_rr","status":"publish","type":"exhibitions","link":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/jcg\/exhibitions\/reko-rennie-oa_rr\/","title":{"rendered":"Reko Rennie: OA_RR"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Reko Rennie: OA_RR<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

A visually impressive declaration of Aboriginal presence, pride and cultural authority.    <\/h4>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Exhibition Details<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Exhibition Open: <\/strong>29 May \u2013 23 August 2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Supported By:<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

John Curtin Gallery presents two major multi-channel video works by celebrated Kamilaroi\/Gamilaroi artist Reko Rennie, OA_RR<\/em> (2016\u201317) and Initiation OA_RR<\/em> (2021). Immersive in scale and sound, these works combine striking visual performance with immersive soundtracks, blending urban car culture, ancestral motifs, and personal memory into bold, cinematic experiences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although Rennie grew up in Melbourne, Victoria, his heritage lies with the Kamilaroi people of northern New South Wales. The significance of this lineage was instilled by his grandmother Julia, who was forcibly removed from her family in the 1920s and enslaved on a pastoral station. A childhood memory of a photograph \u2013 depicting a pastoralist and his wife seated in their Rolls-Royce in \u201cSunday best\u201d \u2013 became a potent symbol of injustice for Rennie. The image of colonial wealth and leisure stood in stark contrast to his grandmother\u2019s dispossession.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In OA_RR<\/em> (Original Aboriginal Reko Rennie), Rennie reclaims this symbol. Driving a 1973 Rolls-Royce Corniche, hand-painted in his signature fluorescent camouflage layered with traditional Kamilaroi diamond patterns, he journeys back to Country near his grandmother\u2019s birthplace. Camouflage, historically used to conceal, becomes a strategy of amplification in Rennie\u2019s hands, an assertion rather than a disguise. As he performs circular movements in the red earth, the vehicle\u2019s tracks reference both urban burnout culture and ceremonial Kamilaroi sand engravings. The emotive soundtrack by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds intensifies the ritualistic and cinematic quality of this return, transforming the landscape into a site of remembrance and resistance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The companion work, Reko Rennie:<\/em> Initiation OA_RR<\/em>, shifts to the industrial docks and streets of Footscray in Melbourne\u2019s west \u2013 territory formative to Rennie\u2019s youth. Here, a metallic pink 1973 Holden Monaro performs burnouts against a backdrop of shifting urban identity. The work operates as a self-portrait and homage to his grandmother, who once dreamt of becoming an opera singer. That unrealised aspiration resonates through a commissioned operatic score by Yorta Yorta composer and soprano Deborah Cheetham, performed with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and sung in Kamilaroi language. Her soaring voice overlays spectacle with cultural sovereignty and intergenerational healing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Beginning in Melbourne\u2019s graffiti scene, Rennie has consistently translated Kamilaroi design vocabularies into bold contemporary forms across painting, sculpture, installation, and film. His \u201creverse camouflage\u201d refuses invisibility, whether on suburban trains or within museum walls worldwide. Together, OA_RR<\/em> and Initiation OA_RR<\/em> collapse boundaries between street performance and ceremony, colonial history and contemporary assertion. Through movement, mark-making, and sound, Rennie transforms both desert and docklands into charged terrains of memory \u2013 <\/ins>declaring continuous Aboriginal presence, pride, and cultural authority.    <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Artist<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Reko Rennie (born 1974) is a Kamilaroi\/Gamilaraay\/Gummaroi artist based in Melbourne whose interdisciplinary practice spans painting, sculpture, installation, video and public art. Rennie\u2019s work is deeply rooted in his lived experience drawing on the visual languages of popular culture and his Kamilaroi heritage. Largely self-taught, he began his creative journey as a teenager producing graffiti across the streets and laneways of Melbourne\u2019s inner west, a formative influence that continues to shape his bold aesthetic and use of colour.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rennie fuses traditional diamond-shaped Kamilaroi motifs with contemporary forms and media to challenge romanticised assumptions about Aboriginal art and identity, and to spark conversations about cultural visibility, power and history in a contemporary urban context. His distinctive visual language \u2014 often featuring repeated geometric patterns, symbolic stencils and vibrant palette \u2014 negotiates contested binaries of visible and invisible, public and private, traditional and modern.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Header Image: <\/sub>Reko Rennie<\/strong> OA_RR, 2016-17 Video still, three-channel video, sound, edition of 3 + 2AP, Image courtesy the artist and STATION<\/sub><\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"template":"","exhibition-locations":[3],"class_list":["post-2967","exhibitions","type-exhibitions","status-publish","hentry","exhibition-locations-john-curtin-gallery"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/jcg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/exhibitions\/2967","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/jcg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/exhibitions"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/jcg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/exhibitions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/jcg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2967"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"exhibition-locations","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/jcg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/exhibition-locations?post=2967"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}