Beyond the Future: Papers from the Third Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

I mean no disrespect to Indigenous people who are involved in these events but I raise these issues because Ind igenous culture is comprised of much more than a westernised visual construct within a gallery or museum context. Our cultural expression is multi-faceted and should be considered holistically. After great consideration , it seems increasingly apparent to me that the spectacle that will be associated with the 2000 Games has a much closer correlation with events such as the APT than is immediately apparent. One event may be configured by a focus on tourism, the other on cultural expression and representation, but often this is exactly how Indigenous people are considered in this country - a commodity to be packaged and sold, associated with a cultural event. Artists/cultural activists stripped back to the bare, superficial bones obscured by a pre­ determined dot screen, layering/diluting the intent of the work/performance/message. This m ight sound somewhat off track to what was previously mentioned , but Caroline's comments overseas to a mostly un informed audience, are simply indicative of a negating of our multi­ layered existence and experiences 'back home'. Locating a Waanyi woman like Judy Watson in some intangible urban environment - a landless, language-less void - merely reinforces our invisibility, as has been discussed by and through the work of many contemporary Ind igenous artists over the past two decades at least. Unfortunately Caroline is not alone in prescribing 'nowhere' places for many Indigenous people. · A recent example involved an artist in this year's Australian Perspecta in Sydney, whose images of unpeopled urban and desert environs were shown at the Australian Centre for Photography. The artist posed the (perhaps) rhetorical query in text panels alongside his work, 'Perhaps Indigenous people can no longer lay claim to urban spaces.' I read th is as inferring that once country is covered by concrete, built upon, distorted , changed, erased and so on , then it loses its significance for Indigenous people from that place, and those of us who come to live in that place. 1 In turn, this inference suggests that we lose our rights (not in the sense of Native Title but intrinsically as Indigenous people from the land) to that place, or to our own homelands, making us nation-less, state-less. We disappear from the public psyche, as those before us have disappeared , vanishing with little trace, supposedly offering minimal or no resistance, according to one of the speakers yesterday, also a representative of the Queensland Art Gallery. This subtle, insidious reinforcing, forcing of Indigenous people into conditioned/expected roles as providers of the consumable, five-minute entertainment fixes undermines, overlooks and rejects all that I ndigenous people have been speaking about and acting u pon through our work. A further point I wish to make is that by locking us within cities, severing our links for us, however subl iminally, refuses to acknowledge our connections with country and our communities; situating us with in an 'us' ('poor displaced u rbs') and 'them' ('traditional Aborigines') locale. We become forcibly disembodied , deconstructed and our communal links dissipate. (Slides shown - 1 . Wide open road running to horizon 2. Road signs 'Poison Gully', ' Heritage Country 3. Remnants of old goatyard at the Bungalow/Half-Caste Children's Home outs ide Al ice Springs 4 . Central Austral ian sunset 5 . Top End burn-off) I have del iberately chosen images of country that are people-less and scarred by roads, s i gns - subtle and not subtle - which carve through country, divid ing up land , j ust as we have been divided by policies. In showing these images I am reminded of the 1 6 th Annual Keynote Address at the National Gallery of Australia by Rudi Fuchs in 1 998 . 1 24