Up in the sky #6

Staged and dreamlike, Tracey Moffatt’s Up in the sky photographs look like stills from a fictitious film. The images depict a Mad Max or Twin Peaks type of dystopia, with odd scenes and characters from an imagined Australian outback town.

The images, which can be viewed in any order, have multiple narratives, including oblique references to the ‘stolen generation’. This was an Australian Government policy from about 1905 to 1970 that saw part-white Aboriginal children forcibly removed from their families and put into state care.

Commissioned by the Dia Center for the Arts, New York, these photographs gave Moffatt international recognition.