Architecture
Blak Box, immerses audiences in First Peoples' storytelling through contemporary architecture, light installation and sound.
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Blak Box is a public art project that invites a connection to Country by engaging audiences in deep listening via a suite of aural works by Aboriginal artists. The contemporary sound pavilion for Urban Theatre Projects was designed by BVN principal Kevin O'Brien, alongside curator Daniel Browning and lighting designer Karen Norris.
A luminous, polycarbonate skin encloses an asymmetrical round where up to 30 visitors can assemble inside on natural ground. The pavilion's lightweight aluminium frame and minimal cladding ensure ease of construction, disassembly and transportation to multiple locations by a small team.
Blak Box avoids the stereotypical markers commonly associated with a representation of Indigenous culture. Instead, it assembles contemporary form, light and sound to remind audiences that concepts of Aboriginality are not separate from the modern world.
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Blak Box's inaugural exhibition took place on Barangaroo Reserve in June 2018 with a sound piece, HumEchoChorus, which combined soundscapes and oral histories of the Barangaroo Harbour headland before 1788. In early 2019, Blak Box was recreated at Blacktown as part of the Sydney Festival. The sound installation, Four Winds, combined the haunting stories of the Darug people and their experience with the intergenerational effects of colonization. In November 2019, Blak Box returned to Barangaroo with a new sound piece and light show, Momentum, which explored representations of First Nations peoples in popular culture.
Credits
BVN
Consultants
Urban Theatre Projects, Murtagh McKeague Optimum Structures
Consultants
Urban Theatre Projects, Murtagh McKeague Optimum Structures
Photography
Barton Taylor