Christian Thompson, the Australian artist taking over London’s streets: ‘I can be my own worst critic’

Detail from Christian Thompson’s Good Country (2021). The Indigenous artist’s work is being exhibited in a new art precinct in London. Photograph: Courtesy the artist and Sarah Scout Presents, Melbourne

As prime minister Kevin Rudd was delivering his apology to the Stolen Generations, on 12 February 2008, First Nations artist Christian Thompson was queueing at Melbourne’s Tullamarine airport, headed for his new home in Europe. There, over the next decade, he would be mentored by the famed performance artist Marina Abramović, complete a masters degree at the Amsterdam School of the Arts and be among the first Indigenous Australians to attend Oxford University in its 900-year history.

“It was an emotional day,” Thompson says. “When I left Australia, I left with the feeling OK, everything’s now sorted, everyone’s good. Go off and do what you need to do. And then, when I got back a decade later, everything had changed.”