Onespace is very proud to announce that Darren Blackman’s ‘Black armband history,’ (2025) has been acquired by the Australian War Memorial. This is the first occasion that Blackman has been acquired by a national institution, one that is Australia’s most visited cultural venue, and in 2023 was listed by tourism company Casago as one of the top ten free tourist attractions in the world.
Writing for Blackman’s catalogue for the launch of his exhibition Post Truth at the 2025 Cairns Indigenous Art Fair, Bruce Johnson McLean states: ‘At the 2025 ANZAC Day dawn ceremony at Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance, an Australian neo-Nazi heckled the Acknowledgement of Country, sparking caustic commentary from right-wing news sites that further emboldened attacks against this unique Australian protocol. The site and significance of this symbolic act of racism are not subtle: in the same moment that many were repeating ‘Lest We Forget’, the iconic slogan for the ANZACs, many right-wing conservatives were calling for the forgetting of thousands of generations of Aboriginal existence.
Blackman’s, ‘Black armband history’ (2025), featuring the text ‘lest we know’, was created in the months before this flashpoint and captures the tenor of this dialogue. Whenever the suffering, dispossession, or sacrifice of First Nations peoples is mentioned, the resounding response from Australians is to forget or get over it. Poetic, poignant, and political, Blackman’s neon text works illuminate the dichotomy between the white remembering and black forgetting that underpins so much of our national myth making.’
Image: Ketakii Jewson Brian. Michael Marzik. Courtesy of the artist and Onespace.
