Where Art & History Collide 2005 - present
How do we construct our past? What is history? What do we remember? How does that change over time? And what does this mean with regard to our decision-making?
These are the political questions that drive the works in this series. They are also post-colonial questions in that they help us ask ourselves where the power lies in any situation, why this could be and whether things have changed or could change and what that might mean. |
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__About These Works
The works developed as part of the Where Art & History Collide series don't end with the audience leaving an event. Instead, they are works designed to trigger memories, and allow a myriad of responses that cause ripples of conversation, not just about the past but how to shape our futures. In these works, there is no end to the artistic process, nor a desire to communicate a single artist-generated narrative during performances. Rather, the works are designed to help the audience practically question the world we live in, and our roles in the construction of our pasts, presents, and futures, while also revealing how knowledge is transmitted and power is held or dissipated. Given the fluidity of the artistic process, the lines between performers and audience members are often blurred, particularly in my latest work that focuses on Papua New Guinea. Developing this line of enquiry through arts practice is a very rich experience, particularly as it offers ways to test assumptions through research and engagement with co-creators and audiences. History of Development This strand of work began literally in a gutter during a conversation with Nigel Kellaway at the 2002 Performance Space Christmas party at the old space at 199 Cleveland Street in Redfern, Sydney, Australia. The idea came into my mind of creating a performance where the ideas of historic figures would collide, with Nigel done up as a red be-wigged Mary Queen of Scotts (of course). The idea soon mutated into working with recorded history - audio recordings of political speeches in particular - and narrowed to being Australia-specific at which point the connections between seeking knowledge of history and making decisions came into focus. These explorations became the starting point for the work Not the Sound Bite! Interdisciplinarity, not just between artforms, but between art and the field of history, has become particularly relevant during the development of this series of work, especially in relation to the questioning of the construction of history. As a Fellow in what is now the Scholars and Artists in Residence program at the National Film and Sound Archive, Canberra, I was able to conduct research aimed at developing methodologies for working with archival materials and explore how these processes might manifest as art. From this point the work has continued to deepen and is currently in research and development as The PNG Work which utilises 16mm film of events in Papua New Guinea, taken by Australians. |