Reko Rennie OA_RR
I was born in an urban environment where traditional notions of initiation, were experienced in a completely different way to my ancestral home of the Kamilaroi/Gamilaroi people of NorthWestern NSW – Reko Rennie
John Curtin Gallery presents two major multi-channel video works by celebrated Kamilaroi/Gamilaroi artist Reko Rennie, OA_RR (2016–17) and Initiation OA_RR (2021). Immersive in scale and sound, these works combine striking visual performance with immersive soundtracks, blending urban car culture, ancestral motifs, and personal memory into bold, cinematic experiences.
Although Rennie grew up in Melbourne, Victoria, his heritage lies with the Kamilaroi people of northern New South Wales. The significance of this lineage was instilled by his grandmother Julia, who was forcibly removed from her family in the 1920s and enslaved on a pastoral station. A childhood memory of a photograph – depicting a pastoralist and his wife seated in their Rolls-Royce in “Sunday best” – became a potent symbol of injustice for Rennie. The image of colonial wealth and leisure stood in stark contrast to his grandmother’s dispossession.
In OA_RR (Original Aboriginal Reko Rennie), Rennie reclaims this symbol. Driving a 1973 Rolls-Royce Corniche, hand-painted in his signature fluorescent camouflage layered with traditional Kamilaroi diamond patterns, he journeys back to Country near his grandmother’s birthplace. Camouflage, historically used to conceal, becomes a strategy of amplification in Rennie’s hands, an assertion rather than a disguise. As he performs circular movements in the red earth, the vehicle’s tracks reference both urban burnout culture and ceremonial Kamilaroi sand engravings. The emotive soundtrack by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds intensifies the ritualistic and cinematic quality of this return, transforming the landscape into a site of remembrance and resistance.
The companion work, Initiation OA_RR, shifts to the industrial docks and streets of Footscray in Melbourne’s west – territory formative to Rennie’s youth. Here, a metallic pink 1973 Holden Monaro performs burnouts against a backdrop of shifting urban identity. The work operates as a self-portrait and also pays homage to his grandmother, who once dreamt of becoming an opera singer. That unrealised aspiration resonates through a commissioned operatic score by Yorta Yorta composer and soprano Deborah Cheetham, performed with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and sung in Kamilaroi language. Her soaring voice overlays spectacle with cultural sovereignty and intergenerational healing.
Beginning in Melbourne’s graffiti scene, Rennie has consistently translated Kamilaroi design vocabularies into bold contemporary forms across painting, sculpture, installation and film. His “reverse camouflage” refuses invisibility, whether on suburban trains or within museum walls worldwide. Together, OA_RR and Initiation OA_RR collapse boundaries between street performance and ceremony, colonial history and cultural assertion. Through movement, mark-making, and sound, Rennie transforms both desert and docklands into charged terrains of memory – declaring continuous Aboriginal presence, pride, and cultural authority.
Over more than two decades, Rennie has exhibited widely in Australia and internationally. In 2024 the National Gallery of Victoria presented a major retrospective of Rennie’s work titled REKOSPECTIVE: The Art of Reko Rennie and he was awarded GQ’s Artist of the Year. His work has been presented at 56th Venice Biennale (2015) and the XIII Bienal de Cuenca (2016), and he has participated in major curated exhibitions such as the 2022 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art. In 2008 he received the Victorian Indigenous Art Award, and his work is represented in significant public and private collections. Rennie’s practice continues to provoke nuanced discussion on identity, colonial legacies, and cultural presence through dynamic, visually compelling works.
This publication supports the exhibition
Reko Rennie: OA_RR 29 May – 23 August 2026
@johncurtingallery
gallery@curtin.edu.au
curtin.edu.au/jcg
JOHN CURTIN GALLERY
Above: Reko Rennie, Initiation OA_RR, 2021, video still, three channel digital video, stereo sound, duration 7:37 min. Image courtesy the artist and Ames Yavuz
Cover image: Reko Rennie, OA_RR, 2016-17, video still (detail), three channel video, sound, duration 7:47 min. Image courtesy the artist and Ames Yavuz.
Photo by Justin McManus and Reko Rennie