What is valued or recognised as art is a thorny issue. It’s a question that curators around the world are constantly grappling with, and slowly long-held ideas, which often centred white experiences and perspectives, are starting to shift.

As part of that process, London’s Tate Modern has appointed Yorta Yorta woman Kimberley Moulton as an adjunct curator, specialising in First Nations and Indigenous Art.

It’s a big appointment for the 38-year-old, who resigned as senior curator of the First Peoples collection at Melbourne Museum recently and will take up the part-time Tate role next month.

Also an associate artistic director of Melbourne’s Rising Festival, Moulton is the mind behind the festival’s stunning Shadow Spirit exhibition, held at Flinders Street Station, which will tour later this year.

Moulton is employed to rethink the Tate’s collections and research through a non-western lens, and advise about acquisitions of Indigenous art. She joins a team of curators working within the Tate Research Centre: Transnational, one from Africa and another from the Caribbean, who will work from their home communities, visiting the gallery in person a few times a year. Integrated within Tate Modern’s curatorial team, the centre contributes to exhibitions, displays, acquisitions and events across Tate’s four galleries and with a wide network of collaborators.

“The Tate is one of the world’s leading art galleries and has a huge influence on how we consider art, how we interpret and understand the world through contemporary art. So it’s really important to have other voices in there,” Moulton says.

“It’s about how we look at history really and what is considered to be art or what’s considered to be worthy of being in these institutions, and that’s often been led by or has its roots in white supremacy or the West being the Imperial power,” she says. “So it’s not about ignoring the art histories that we know but reframing and rethinking that through an Indigenous perspective as well and what that looks like.”

To her mind, the research centre is leading the space in critically looking at western art histories and rethinking and reframing what that can be. Indigenous artists have been making work about restitution and repatriation for a long time, a key focus for her. “The possibilities are expansive in the context of global Indigenous art and I’m excited to be going out into the world, as a Yorta Yorta woman from the country town of Shepparton, to hopefully impact our representation in art history.”