Mother Courage

Mother Courage is a video and sculptural installation commissioned by ACMI and dOCUMENTA(13). Based on Bertolt Brecht’s play Mother Courage and Her Children the work reconstructs an immersive bushcamp environment within the gallery space, and explores the tensions between contemporary urban and traditional Indigenous lifestyles.

The installation comprises a white van housing a dual screen projection of an elderly Aboriginal woman artist and her grandson. Surrounded by paint pots, utensils and bedding, the woman (played by artist Grace Rubuntja) applies herself to her work, while the boy sits, bored, listening to loud Aboriginal rock music that blares out of a radio inside the van.

Mother Courage is inspired by Bertolt Brecht’s famous character Mother Courage. In Brecht’s 1939 play, Mother Courage and Her Children, the title character, displaced by war, survives by moving and adapting to whatever life throws at her. In this way, she shares common ground with many Aboriginal people, particularly those Aboriginal women who, like Mother Courage, know what it is to lose children in a hostile world.

Thornton’s Mother Courage was first exhibited in 2012 at the prestigious contemporary art exhibition dOCUMENTA (13) held in Kassel, Germany. For the period of the exhibition, it was constantly on the move, ‘parked outside the most prestigious galleries in town, for art aficionados to peer in its grimy windows through its rear doors, to wonder at the business inside’. At ACMI, the work was reborn within the space of Gallery 2, no longer on the move, but cutting against the grain of the white cube/black box experience of the art gallery space.