Is the 2024 Venice Biennale Golden Lion winner, Archie Moore going to be permanently employed recreating his enveloping artwork kith and kin around the world now that it’s been ‘bought’ by the Australian government and presented to galleries in Brisbane and London?

The question arises because the work that covered four walls and the ceiling of the Australian Pavilion in Venice needs to be recreated in detail each time it’s shown. And Moore has explained that, in Venice, it took him and his team working eight-hour days, six days a week for five weeks to install the original. “The writing on the ceiling was the most physically challenging,” he admitted, “and now I know how Michelangelo felt working on the Sistine Chapel”.

Because it is such a large installation, kith and kin has been acquired as a set of artist instructions rather than the physical installation that appeared in Venice. It can therefore co-exist at both the Tate Modern Gallery in London and Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane without incurring additional shipping, conservation or storage costs.

In answer to my original question, I’ve been assured, “Archie, as the artist, installs the work” – which makes sense in terms of the almost infinite detail he included of his 2,400 generations of Kamilaroi, Bigambul and Scottish ancestors over 60,000 years, chalked in boxes around the room in Venice. But does it make sense in terms of the new art that he won’t have time to create? After all, the late American artist, Sol le Witt made a career out of issuing instructions for others to cover gallery walls with his art.

And, if exhibitions of  kith and kin can coexist, who gets the original piles of legal papers relating to hundreds of First Nations deaths in custody that are currently piled on a platform over water in the middle of Venetian pavilion room?

But what a wonderful gesture by the Albanese government (courtesy of Tony Burke, Arts Minister, no doubt) to recognise that Moore’s work, curated by Ellie Buttrose from QAGoMA, was the first time that any Aussie in the long history of our engagement with the Venice Biennale, going back to 1954, has taken out the Golden Lion for Best Pavilion. At least 27 of our finest – including Rover Thomas, Trevor Nickolls, Emily Kngwarreye, Tracey Moffatt and Judy Watson – have no doubt dreamed of winning the Lion since we opened our first Pavilion building there in 1988.

And when one takes on board current levels of knee-jerk censorship emerging, as when pianist Jayson Gillham dedicated a piece of music to the journalists killed in Gaza, it gives great credance to an Australian government that can accept Moore’s commentary on Indigenous massacres – holes in the wallscape acknowledge them – of Aboriginal deaths in custody, and of the artist’s assertion of his First Nations sovereignty through the work.

But what was the magical concept that raised ‘kith and kin’ to such artistic heights? Aesthetically, it’s awfully hard to judge what has been described as a sacred space, immersing viewers in “the fullness of Indigenous time” from the distance of Australia. But Archie himself has offered a quote that, I suspect, gets into almost any physical viewer’s experience: “‘kith and kin’ is a memorial dedicated to every living thing that has ever lived, it is a space for quiet reflection on the past, the present and the future”.

A more political take was offered by The Guardian newspaper’s UK arts editor, Alex Needham: “In its own time-spanning, quietly eloquent way, kith and kin seems to embody the kind of voices Australia declined to listen to in the Voice referendum, but people overseas might”.

Here’s how the panel of international judges came to their conclusion. “The installation stood out for its strong aesthetic, its lyricism and its invocation of a shared loss of an occluded past. With his inventory of thousands of names, Moore also offers a glimmer of the possibility of recovery”.

And it has its own website.

While the exhibition in Venice continues until 24 November, we don’t yet have dates for a presentation of the work at the Tate (which will show the National Gallery’s Emily Kam Kngwarray solo show next year). But QAGoMA has said it will present the installation in Brisbane next August.