"We're taking a 'B' and an 'L' and we're making it a little blacker at ACCA," Paola Balla said on Thursday.
The co-curator of the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art's first exhibition dedicated entirely to Aboriginal artists, which opens on Saturday, isn't entirely kidding.
"I might even bring in some letters from home," she jokes, adding she might install them outside the Sturt Street gallery's front entrance.
The opening of Sovereignty, one of the first shows instituted by new ACCA director Max Delany, comes as the National Gallery of Victoria stages Who's Afraid of Colour?, possibly the largest showcase of Indigenous women artists ever held in Australia.
Judith Ryan, the NGV's senior curator of Indigenous art, pulled the showcase of more than 100 artists from across Australia together within four months, thanks to her almost 40 years of institutional memory, acquisitions and encouragement of Aboriginal women over that time.
Together the exhibitions illustrate how attitudes within Australia's cultural institutions are shifting; they're checking their privilege and whiteness, and finding new ways of working with Indigenous curators, artists and communities.
"You do see a shift in the institutions," Balla says. "We do need to challenge our practice, just challenge privilege, challenge whiteness and start thinking from intersectional perspectives."
The exhibitions also reflect the growing prominence of Indigenous female artists across Australia and internationally. Tracey Moffatt will represent Australia at the 2017 Venice Biennale, two decades after Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Judy Watson and Yvonne Koolmatrie wowed the Giardini.
Ryan has long encouraged and emerging artists and charted new forms of practice, including Wiradjuri artist Lorraine Connelly-Northey, who makes narrbongs (dilly bags) by hand out of scrap metal. The first templates for her signature works, commissioned by Ryan in the early 2000s, feature in Who's Afraid of Colour?
Balla and her contemporaries such as Kimberley Moulton, Museum Victoria's senior curator of Southeastern Australia Aboriginal collections, are following in Ryan's footsteps, changing institutions from the inside.
"There's a growing group of curators and we're really trying to make the institutions more responsive to us and engaged with us in a way that is really self determining," Balla said. "We're not going to decolonise ACCA ... but [this is] a huge step."
Several of the female artists represented at ACCA and the NGV have influenced Balla.
"Maree Clarke and Vicki Couzens have mentored me since I was 18," she said. "They were the first actual artists I knew, apart from my grandmother ... Destiny [Deacon] was my first tutor at Melbourne University."
"For me, [having as mentors] Indigenous women who are just trailblazers is astonishing."
Who's Afraid of Colour? is at the Ian Potter Centre, NGV Australia, until April 17. Sovereignty runs from December 17 to March 26.