Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters

Featuring more than 300 paintings and objects by over 100 artists, this is the first time this exhibition has been seen outside Australia, as its European debut takes place at The Box in Plymouth.

Originally staged at the National Museum of Australia (NMA) in Canberra and touring to Perth’s Western Australian Museum Boola Bardip, the exhibition has attracted over 400,000 visitors to date. Entirely conceived and curated by a team of First Australians, led by Margo Neale, Senior Indigenous Curator at the NMA and custodial elders from across the Central and Western Deserts of Australia, it expertly combines state-of-the art exhibition and display technologies with art, song and dance in order to share ancient stories from the world’s oldest continuing culture.

Songlines takes visitors on an epic journey that traverses three states, three deserts and some 500,000 square kilometres. The highly immersive exhibition travels from west to east: from the Western Australian coast to the APY Lands in the east, using the power of contemporary art, performance and song to re-animate traditional stories, photography, multimedia and the world’s highest-resolution seven-metre-wide travelling dome.

The ‘DomeLab‘ transports viewers to places deep in the desert relating to the Seven Sisters Songlines, including the remote Cave Hill site in South Australia – home to the only known Seven Sisters rock art in the world – as well as showing animated artworks and their relationship to the stars and constellations.

As an important city in Britain’s naval history, Plymouth’s close ties with Australia go back centuries as a point of departure and mass migration from the UK. Songlines’ timely arrival at The Box comes as societies in the UK, Australia and across the world grasp the urgent need to reflect and embrace cultural diversity and re-evaluate our relationship with each other, our immediate environment, and the planet as a whole.

Songlines will run from 21 October 2021 - 22 February 2022. For further information, see https://www.theboxplymouth.com/events/exhibitions/songlines.