Cutting to the Core

ULURU & KATA TJUTA PHOTOGRAPHS

By Anish Kapoor

Published by Steidl, Gottingen, 2020

In Australia, it is customary to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which one stands. While the gesture is too nominal to redress centuries of injustice faced by Indigenous Australians, it is an act of remembering their dispossession and their continued connection to the land. Anish Kapoor’s latest two-volume publication collates the British-Indian artist’s photographs from a trip to Uluru and Kata Tjuta in Australia’s Northern Territory. The two iconic rock formations are traditionally owned by the Aṉangu, but you wouldn’t know that from reading the book.

“Reading” is probably the wrong word, as the only texts are the geographical markers that divide the sizable into 13 chapters, and the artist’s quotes that grace the two covers. The front of bears the