Songlines, the Quai Branly Museum exhibition that plunges us into the Australian legends

For them, art, history and religion are one and the same: the Aboriginal peoples ofAustralia keep alive the memory and the words of the elders through songs, paintings and ceremonies. The Quai Branly Museum invites us to discover these stories and ancestral songs through an immersive and unusual exhibition, to be seen from April 4th to July 2nd 2023.

The exhibition Songlines - Songs of the Australian Desert takes us to the great plains of the heart of Australia, in the footsteps of these singing Aborigines. The Quai Branly Museum focuses on one of the most popular stories of the country: the story of the Seven Sisters. Myth, life lesson, moralizing legends: these tales serve as much as entertainment as they do asteachings for the people who tell them.

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These songlines (or songs of the tracks in French) allow for the perpetuation and understanding of moral principles, but also fundamental teachings on the rules of society, the rules of nature, and the knowledge essential for survival in the desert. Behind the stories of ogres and giant animals lies thehistory of the territory and its peoples.

The exhibition highlights nearly 200 works, enriched by some twenty sound and audiovisual devices , to fully immerse us in this culture. Sound narratives, installations and filmed ceremonies accompany the paintings and sculptures that embody these stories. The culture lives differently among the Australian Aborigines, and the Quai Branly Museum allows us to be the privileged witness of this transfer of knowledge.

Through a journey full of surprises, the Quai Branly Museum immerses us entirely in these cultures and this thousand-year-old history. Follow the lines on the ground, listen to the songs and testimonies of the aboriginal artists and be surprised by these very colorful works, which hide many secrets when you know how to decipher them...

Come and listen to the stories and memories of the elders, and take part in the sharing and survival of this ancestral knowledge.