Matthew Harris – Inalienable Possession, 2026

Across ten raw cotton canvases, Harris paints a grid of 39,000 cells in vivianite, a rare blue mineral pigment sometimes called “corpse crystal” because it forms from minerals released by decaying organic matter. Each cell corresponds to one of approximately 39,000 Aboriginal cultural belongings held in UK institutions. Many remain unphotographed, uncatalogued or inaccessible, represented publicly only by numbers or redacted spreadsheets. The grid adopts the impersonal language of institutional classification, yet its handmade surface wavers and gathers into encrusted areas. Reclamation is central to Harris’s practice, which traces the ongoing circulation of First Peoples belongings through colonial and commercial systems. By giving material form to an abstract institutional count, Harris makes visible the scale of dispossession and frames recognition as a first step towards the reclamation of cultural belongings.

Questions of value, displacement, conservation, and restitution underpin Matthew Harris’ practice. Through painting and sculpture, the artist of Koorie and European descent, combines minimal abstraction with references to art history and elements of kitsch, creating dissonances that destabilise established hierarchies of value and taste. Often infused with humour and an attention to material histories, his work places visibility and absence in tension, highlighting the complex dynamics of cultural memory.

La Biennale de Lyon acknowledges all First Nations peoples of Australia, their Traditional Custodians of the lands, and Elders past and present. We honour the enduring strength, diversity, and richness of First Nations artistic and cultural practices. We recognise First Nations peoples as Australia’s first artists, whose creative traditions have been sustained across millennia and continue to shape the Nation’s cultural landscape today.