Aboriginal Art from the Ebes Collection

"Every picture is a story; and every story a picture."

This is the Australian gallery owner Hank Ebes's succinct description of the fascinating Aboriginal world of images. He first came across it in the early 1970s when he went into the Australian bush and met the country's indigenous people.

Due in no small part to his efforts, today works from remote regions of Australia are a recognised part of the international contemporary art scene.

In the exhibition DREAMTIME, ARKEN presents more than 100 Aboriginal paintings from Ebes's private collection.

Once you set out to breaking the codes in the Aboriginal pictures, the reward comes in the form of a number of dramatic stories that speak of love, life and death, the quest for food, the rules of conduct between members of the group, and not least of the group's and the individual's relation to the ancestral beings that are an integral part of the identity of the Aboriginals and the history of the country.

All the stories take place in the mythological Dreamtime during which, according to Aboriginal belief, the world was created: This was when the spirits of the ancestors awoke. They founded the law regulating conduct between people and created the landscape and all things living. Thereupon the spirits lay down to rest in the landscape, taking the form of natural phenomena such as stones, grains of sand and rocks. Thus even today the landscape houses the spirits of the ancestors, literally constituting the roots of the population and the culture. Therefore, when today the Aboriginals travel through the landscape and make images of it, they are directly connected to the spirits of their ancestors - they are one with the past: The linear sense of time does not exist.

Dreamings
Just as knowledge of the Dreamtime is necessary to understand the Aboriginals' imagery, one needs to know what a Dreaming is. Many of the work titles contain this word which is an English translation of a term from the Aranda language.

Dreamings do not, as one might imagine, refer to nighttime dreams but rather it is a kind of ever-living myth of one or more creative ancestors. Each Aboriginal and each group are inextricably bound up with certain Dreamings - they are born with them, so to speak - and these Dreamings connect them as groups or individuals to the time of the genesis (Dreamtime) and to certain ancestral beings. The individual Dreamings are also representations of the creative energy that is present in the land and which must be maintained.

The exhibition will take place until 11 June 2006.

For further information, please visit http://www.arken.dk/exhibition_item.asp?ID=13058

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