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For Indigenous artist Gabi Briggs, her collective's second show comes at "an auspicious time".
"A lot of things happened around this time of year," she told ABC Radio Melbourne's Jon Faine.
"We had the [1967] referendum, the Mabo decision, the tabling of the Bringing Them Home report, which are pretty critical things that have informed my existence as an Aboriginal woman."
She and Arika Waulu form the Indigenous art collective Real Blak Tingz, whose exhibition The Blak Matriarchy is showing at the Koorie Heritage Trust in Federation Square.
Ms Briggs said both of the collective's shows had happened in the past month.
"I guess we're in the initial stages of figuring out what we are," she said.
"We do approach the arts as a place where we can have some type of resistance, have some autonomy in our political views and try and engage with the public, with Australian society about issues that are really important to us."
Those issues include Aboriginal sovereignty, a timely subject given the outcome of last week's First Nations National Constitutional Convention at Uluru.
The artists are also concerned with "what it's like living as an Aboriginal woman in Australian society under the Commonwealth, under the crown, which is a patriarchy," Ms Briggs said.
Ms Waulu said the exhibition was "quite personal" and featured photographs of her grandmother and grandaunts.
"We wanted to look at matriarchs from a matriarchal society, which we're both from, and our grandmothers are the faces of a matriarchal society," she said.
"These women, their mothers were forced from their missions away from their families because they were light skinned.
"They were forced to come and live in Melbourne as domestics and to work as slaves, basically, for the patriarchy."
Koorie Heritage Trust's Tom Mosby said he was excited by "this celebration of women".
"When we're looking at the things like the 1967 referendum, there were women that were at the forefront of making that happen.
"Then we start looking at things like the Stolen Generations and the Bringing Them Home report, the impact of that on women who had their children taken away from them — it's such a powerful story and it's such a powerful thing to be able to present in the way the [exhibition does].
"We're very proud to have the exhibition here at this time, especially, during this celebration and acknowledgement of Reconciliation Week."
The exhibition continues until July 30.
Topics: arts-and-entertainment, indigenous-aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander, contemporary-art, installation, photography, fine-art-photography, indigenous-culture, human-interest, melbourne-3000, federation-square-3000
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