A Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney touring exhibition, Walk & Don’t Look Blak was the first museum survey by Australian indigenous artist Destiny Deacon.

Spanning fifteen years, this exhibition demonstrated Deacon’s versatile and innovative practice that questioned historical representations of Aboriginal people through the kitsch artefacts of popular culture; their playful appearance often shadowed by more sinister forces of racism, incarceration and violence.

Curated by Natalie King, Walk & Don’t Look Blak drew out recurrent themes within Deacon’s prolific practice: landscape, portraiture, narrative and phantasmagoria. These themes intersect through repeated use of dolls and found objects, as well as Deacon’s revisiting of key images to foreground her recurrent investment in ideas of memory, intimacy, cruelty and loss.

This exhibition was staged concurrently with Lisa Reihana: New Work.