For Miyarrka Media this show represents more than simply an opportunity to travel to Brisbane to exhibit material from an exotic and separate elsewhere. The installation is intended to position both Yolngu and gallery visitors in a relationship of potential connectability made possible by these new technologies and the shared imaginative and communicative spaces they animate. And so the exhibition poses several implicit questions: What kinds of new recognitions and reciprocations is this exhibition attempting to produce? Why does this matter at this moment in Australian social, as well as technological, history? How might we answer this call from Gapuwiyak?
Conceived and curated out of contemporary Yolngu imperatives, Gapuwiyak Calling represents a unique social commentary on the communicative intimacies and connective power of mobile phones. By claiming creative digital re-mediation as a critical form of cultural labour, this phone-made media (and the exhibition that frames it) challenges binary ways of thinking about human and non-human, global and local, tradition and modernity, past and present, living and dead, old media and new media, Yolngu and Balanda (non-Aboriginal). It brings new dimension to the study of subjects such as digital media; Aboriginal art, media and development; ICTs and cultural change; experimental ethnography; collaborative methods; performance studies; and museum studies.