Panel: Colonial Encounters and Problems of Translation
Copanelists: Joanna Kordus and Deanna Reder
This paper draws together three main areas of research activity: a reflexive (critical) ethnographic practice; an Aboriginal pedagogy; and the creation of art. It charts the methodology required for an artist to step into an “unknowable” culture and produce a body of work out of the “experience.” I argue that the history of ethnographic practices, and, in particular, the post 1970s re-evaluation of the discipline, is central to this type of artistic project.
By positioning the “artist as ethnographer” I am able to draw together the key tenets of inter-cultural engagement and the political and ethical dilemmas of cultural production, as well as my own subjectivity in this collaborative arrangement. This analysis is then translated into local terms—the everyday (lived) life of Alice Springs articulated through an Aboriginal enunciation—my sustained (and on-going) relationship amongst a specific group of Aboriginal families that began in 1999.
Hence my methodology for translating the experience of “being there” into an appropriate representational form is achieved through “a politics of the performative,” a re-enactment and representation of subject identities within our culturally imbricated (and agonistic) relations—the dramaturgy of intercultural encounter. Performance, then, mediates the politics of identity and enables an assertive Aboriginal presencing to occur.
This paper will be supported by a visual presentation of my artistic work wherein performance is posited as a site of agency and resistance—where the participants themselves test colonial tropes of representation, in particular the ethnographic (racial) gaze. Thus performance from the participants’ perspective is one in which they take control of the representation and their subject-identities—and a conceptual re-enactment of culture is presented as a consciously constructed public document, albeit for exhibition or otherwise.
Chris Barry has been a practicing professional artist since 1986. Her work is represented in numerous national and state collections, university collections, state libraries, and regional galleries. She exhibits both nationally and internationally. Most recently her current work was shown at the Heide Museum of Modern Art (Melbourne, 2006) and will be exhibited in Frankfurt later in 2008. Publications featuring some of her writing include: “Displaced Objects (or Sittings for a Family Portrait)” in Story/Telling: The Woodford Forum (QUP, 2001) and “Imaginary Homelands,” in The Journal of Australian Studies No. 61 (QUP, 1999). Her earlier work was also featured on the covers of JAS (Editor: Richard Nile) from 1996–1999. More recently, her work was discussed by Dr. Karen Burns in “Towards Proximity: Chris Barry’s Series, Encountering Culture: A Dialogue” in Imagine . . . the creativity shaping our culture, Heide Museum of Modern Art Catalogue. Issues of marginality, ethnicity, and the construction of difference inform her art practice and writing. She has recently submitted her doctoral thesis for examination: “The Encounter of Culture: A Shared Space or Out of Place? (Dismantling the Self in Central Australia).”