Vernon Ah Kee’s conceptual text pieces, videos, photographs and drawings form a critique of Australian culture from the perspective of the Aboriginal experience of contemporary life. Ah Kee’s works respond to the history of the romantic and exoticised portraiture of ‘primitives’, and effectively reposition the Aboriginal in Australia from an ‘othered thing’, anchored in museum and scientific records to a contemporary people inhabiting real and current spaces and time.

Ah Kee’s work has been exhibited in a number of significant national and international exhibitions, including ‘Revolutions: Forms that turn’, the 16th Biennale of Sydney (2008); ‘Once Removed’, Australian Pavilion, Venice Biennale (2009); ‘Ideas of Barack’, National Gallery of Victoria (2011); ‘Tall Man’, Gertrude Contemporary (2011); ‘Everything Falls Apart’, Artspace Sydney (2012); ‘unDisclosed’: 2nd National Indigenous Art Triennial’, National Gallery of Australia (2012); ‘My Country: I Still Call Australia Home’, Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art (2013); and ‘Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art’, National Gallery of Canada (2013).