Artist's Artwork Statements

Artworks The image is not nothing (Concrete Archives) Kumanara Boogar Australia needs to wake up. Walpa (Wind) Bulga (Big) Maralinga, 2008 I'm listening tonight. There are two things I can hear: water and profit. Kumanara Boogar made a number of works about Why are we selling water to make profit? That's Maralinga prior to their death. what I'm hearing. My people on the river, that relied on those animals Megan Cope for their food source for thousands of years, are now Mourning for Menindee 2020 dying. This is the second wave of genocide that's Mourning for Menindee comes as we continue to happening in my community. witness ongoing ecocide to one of the “Australia’s” So, I'm going to speak for my community. I'm going most important river systems, The Murray Darling to raise a voice for those that have been voiceless over Basin Authority continues to fail the nation and the the last 230 years. connecting Traditional Owners and custodians whom That's what frustrates me and that's what is have lived with and protected the river systems for frustrating our community. centuries. Why are our people dying young? Why are our Alarmed by the enormous fish kills which saw people suffering? hundreds of thousands of fresh water fish species Because of the greed. The taking of our water. suffocate to death from the blue-green algae blooms Where is First Nations rights to water? We have a along with the unrecorded deaths of Emu, Cope felt right to fresh water! compelled to make mourning ceremonial wreaths Put the water back in the river — not just for us — with cotton flowers and fish scales whilst listening but for the environment. to incompetent colonial powers struggle to accept Transcript from ABC Q&A October 29 2019 responsibility for the ecological catastrophe. In Uncle Bruce Shillingworth's words: Phil Collins We just came back from the big Yaama Ngunna zašto ne govorim srpski (na srpskom), 2008 Baaka Corroborree on the rivers: Walgett, Brewarrina, [why i don’t speak serbian (in serbian)] Bourke, Wilcannia, Menindee. I took a convoy of 300 people and, on the rivers, we had about 1000 at the Amidst the political turmoil in Kosovo at the time of Corroborree each night. Those on the journey spoke to its unilateral declaration of independence from Serbia, our elders in those communities; they wanted to hear a number of contributors, mainly Albanian — from from those communities. They have been voiceless for politicians, intellectuals and public figures to ordinary the last couple of years. people — recount in Serbo-Croat the reasons why they Water mismanagement, corruption and corporate no longer speak the language. greed — capitalism — in this country has killed our During communism in Former Yugoslavia, Kosovo rivers. They have killed our communities. had bilingual administration, in Serbian and in Albanian. We've been out in those communities: health has In 1989, after the overthrow of its constitutional deteriorated; our old people are now dying; our young position as an autonomous province, many of the people have a high rate of mental health problems and rights which Albanians had previously exercised were suicides. The people on dialysis can't get water to flush abolished, amongst them the right to the official use their machines. So they've got to migrate, move on to and education in their native language. Throughout bigger towns and cities. the subsequent crisis and Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, A lot of the First Nation people are leaving their Serbian language came to be perceived as the language tribal lands — lands that they've lived on for thousands of the oppressor. Today it is largely abandoned by the and thousands of years. majority Albanian population. How do we bring back the 50-year-old-cod? The community's fraught relationship towards its How do we bring back the freshwater mussels? recent history and the violence of language, resonates How do we bring back the aquatic life, the with the wider questions of trauma, memory, identity, ecosystem and the animals that relied on the river and breakdown, and loss. the water? Counter to common opinion, it is much easier to They are now completely dead: they're extinct. face the prospect of one’s own death than to imagine This has happened over the last 100 years. the death of the symbolic universe articulated in language. And this is precisely what Collins’ film is 3 about – the irreducible corporeality and, consequently, The second draws from Melbourne’s Living Museum the finitude of language. If the viewers believe there of the West’s audio archive of interviews with workers is a message for them here it could be only a brutal from the explosives and munitions factories that one: not only your body but your language too will dry were situated in Maribyrnong in Melbourne’s western to ashes and blow away. In other words: abandon your suburbs. This work also includes selections of music hope of surviving in language, it doesn’t assure you any from the museum’s archives, site recordings and transcendence; forget memory too, it is as fragile – and interviews with historians and museum workers about as mortal – as the body. the history of the weapons development installations in — Boris Buden, ‘Is There Anything Else… Apart From the region as well as the museum’s ongoing project to Bodies And Languages?’, 2011 preserve and maintain access to these stories. Trent Crawford Pam Dimet Newclear 2017 Maralinga 2015 Newclear (2017) is a photographic series that eBay (Warren Paul) repurposes film footage recorded during nuclear Marcoo 2016 explosions. The series reflects upon the intrinsic role Kite 2016 photography has played in the development and proliferation of atomic weapons. Using traditional Warren is an illustrator from Yalata in the far darkroom methods combined with a custom-built west of South Australia. His intricate line drawings robotic exposure device, documented detonations are depict local scenes, the landscape of Yalata viewed exposed to light-sensitive paper to record a timeline from the air, animals and vegetation, dreams and of events. Each vertical slice of the image captures political viewpoints. His works have been distributed an individual frame of the source footage — tracking via the Ceduna Aboriginal Art Centre, and examples from left to right — to represent a pre and post-nuclear are exhibited at Tullawon Aboriginal Health Centre in world. Unlike their source material, the resulting images Yalata. pause the inevitable disintegration into catastrophe, In 2014 Warren embarked upon a major program of instead reflecting humanity’s current position — a point sculpting, pottery and line drawings, in an exploration caught between peace and annihilation. of the images and impacts of the atomic bomb. He is These four images focus on the destruction of working in collaboration with the Ceduna Aboriginal buildings during the American nuclear test Apple-II Arts Centre and the Nuclear Futures program to realise (May 5, 1955). Unlike the tests that came before it, this work. Apple-II was uniquely formulated by the American http://nuclearfutures.org/artists/works/warren- Department of Defense to produce evocative ebay-paul/ photographic footage “useful for imparting to the American public the message of Civil Defense.” Typical Day One. The Beginning of Whatever We Are in Now. American-style residences and public utilities were WARREN (EBAY) PAUL built on the barren Nevada test site, constructing a simulation of prototypical suburban life. Inhabited by https://unlikely.net.au/issue-05/day-one life sized mannequins resembling the American nuclear family, this mock civilisation became colloquially known fine print as “survival town.” READING CIRCLES 2021 Matthew Davis Following conversations with the curators of The Skeins, 2018-21 image is not nothing (Concrete Archives), fine print Skeins is an audio work comprised of two magazine will present READING CIRCLES—a series compositions that trace points of connection and of performative reading/speaking/listening sessions stories of two sites that are integral to the development transliterating the ideas, research and artworks of weapons technology in Australia. which sit in absentia to this exhibition yet have greatly The first of these pieces is composed from influenced its formation. Utilising site, memory, body recordings of wind and the movement of trees in and language READING CIRCLES invites extended Woomera Cemetery made while on a site visit with analysis and dialogue that speaks and attunes to the the artists Lisa Radford and Yhonnie Scarce in 2018. connections between research and artwork. Artworks The image is not nothing (Concrete Archives) Artist Tino Seghal once stated that ‘the objective of crosses, with Pacific items of this work is to become the object of a discussion’. fine adornment, such as leis and feathers, in such a way print too believes in the power of discussion and the that the conceptual framework of the original objects structures of listening. READING CIRCLES explore thes is changed. Original encoded meanings are heightened act of storytelling; the way text, language and sound because of the oppositional placement. inform the experience of art. With a collaborative spirit, The rosary, Nuclear Rosary, White Sunday, fine print seeks to cultivate space for open dialogue is constructed of white luminous plastic flowers, around some of the key ideas in contemporary art separated with spacers of smaller beads made from her practice. This dynamic and potent moment between an grandmother's Christian rosary (Figure 51). The large artist, an artwork, and the audience forms part of fine plastic flowers reference the lei, which in Polynesian print’s ongoing line of enquiry—can transcription illicit culture symbolise welcome and honour. a new and necessary narrative around artmaking and Hastings-Mcfall comments on how the work has meaning? taken on added meaning.

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