MEMORY AND COLONIALISM - Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery...Ferran evokes are not merely traces of the...

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SHADOW LAND MEMORY AND COLONIALISM LAWRENCE WILSON ART GALLERY MONDAY 17 MARCH 2014 SYMPOSIUM PROGRAM Cultural Precinct

Transcript of MEMORY AND COLONIALISM - Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery...Ferran evokes are not merely traces of the...

Page 1: MEMORY AND COLONIALISM - Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery...Ferran evokes are not merely traces of the past, but can perhaps be seen as gentle ghosts still haunting the present. TRACY IRELAND

SHADOW LAND MEMORY AND COLONIALISM

LAWRENCE WILSON ART GALLERY MONDAY 17 MARCH 2014SYMPOSIUM PROGRAM

Cultural Precinct

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1.00 - 1.10 PM WELCOME AND INTRODUCTION

FIRST SESSION Chair: Alistair Paterson

1.10 - 1.40 PM Key Note Address: Jane Lydon Half-lives: Photography, history, memorialisation

1.40 - 2.10 PM Tracy Ireland Photography, archaeology and the education of desire

2.10 - 2.40 PM Sandra Bowdler Photographs of Tasmanian Aborigines at Oyster Cove c.1858

2.40 - 3.10 PM BREAK

SECOND SESSION Chair: Jane Lydon

3.10 - 3.40 PM Jessica Neath Photographs and memorials of absence

3.40 - 4.10 PM Alistair Paterson Art and Contemporary Archaeology: 2014AD

4.10 - 4.40 PM Alison Atkinson-Philips Difficult Knowledge in the Landscape: What difference does art make?

4.40 - 5.00 PM Closing remarks and open discussion

5.00 PM DRINKS

We would like to thank our Campus Partners History and Archaeology

SYMPOSIUM PROGRAMThe power of art to evoke memories of the absent is highlighted in the poignant imagery of Anne Ferran in SHADOW LAND, a survey exhibition featuring works particularly employing photo-media, spanning 30 years that is currently on display at the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery. Ferran’s unique manner of investigating lost histories including those of incarcerated women and children from colonial times, unidentified female inmates of a mental hospital and abandoned industrial landscapes has provided a touchstone for this Symposium on memory. Scholars from the disciplines of History and Archaeology will consider how the materiality of places, landscapes, remains and objects both reflect and shape practices that produce identity and memory.

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JANE LYDON

BIOGRAPHYJane Lydon is the Wesfarmers Chair of Australian History at the University of Western Australia, and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow (2011-14). Her books include Eye Contact: Photographing Indigenous Australians (Duke, 2005) and Fantastic Dreaming: The archaeology of an Aboriginal mission (AltaMira, 2009), which won the Australian Archaeological Association’s John Mulvaney Book Award in 2010. Her most recent book The Flash of Recognition: Photography and the emergence of Indigenous rights (NewSouth, 2012) explores the ways that photography has been called upon to argue on behalf of Aboriginal people, and won the 2013 Queensland Literary Awards’ History Book Award. She is currently working with four European museums (the University of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum, the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, the Musée de Quai Branly in Paris and the Museum Volkenkunde in Leiden) to research their collections of historical photographs and return them to Aboriginal relatives.

ABSTRACTHalf-lives: Photography, history, memorialisationLike an historian, Anne Ferran’s photographic practice reflects upon the relationship between past and present, seeking to remember and reclaim the forgotten women and children of Australia’s colonial history. Like an archaeologist, she focuses upon fragments and traces that are clues to human experience. As she turns object into image into object, harnessing photography’s power to show what is or has been, her practice evokes recent debates about photographs as things rather than signs, and about their power as objects circulating through the world. Through these poignant memorials Ferran draws attention to historical blind-spots that map present-day concerns, and points obliquely to the marginalised place of women in Australian society. The moving and insistent ‘half-lives’ Ferran evokes are not merely traces of the past, but can perhaps be seen as gentle ghosts still haunting the present.

TRACY IRELAND

BIOGRAPHYTracy Ireland is an archaeologist and heritage practitioner with over 25 years experience working in heritage management, research, education and policy. Tracy joined the University of Canberra in 2009 and is currently the Head of the Discipline of Humanities. She previously led the Canberra office of Godden Mackay Logan, Heritage Consultants, lectured at the University of Sydney and worked as the Archaeologist for the NSW Heritage Council. Tracy’s research interests include historical and landscape archaeology, heritage management and conservation, as well as the ethics of archaeology and heritage and the cultural politics of the past. Tracy is Series Editor, with Cristobal Gnecco, of the Ethics in Archaeology Series for Springer, New York, and is a contributor to the Troodos Archaeological and Environmental Survey Project recently published in two volumes entitled Landscape and Interaction by the Council for British Research in the Levant. She is currently working on the Material Memories Project which examines the conservation of archaeological remains and heritage place making in settler societies.

ABSTRACTPhotography, archaeology and the education of desireAnne Ferran’s photography deals with the stuff of archaeology and heritage and with the spaces and places where memory adheres despite erosion, ruination or the cultural politics of ‘commanded forgetting’. Absences and emptiness are as potent memory triggers as ruins and memorials. These stolid, solid things are often thought of as carrying the past into the present in a straightforward kind of way. But both things and the absence of things can be the materials for memory work that responds to contemporary desires. Ferran’s photography refuses seduction by colonial nostalgia and the desire to fill historical voids with representations and narratives, as we often see demanded by the commodification of heritage and its grounding of identity in place, restorations and ruins. The intertwined histories of archaeology and photography suggest how the desire to know the past through forms of materiality and documentation, memory and historicity , have become so culturally embedded that they can appear natural and not cultural at all.

SANDRA BOWDLER

BIOGRAPHYSandra Bowdler has been a professional archaeologist since 1970, and has carried out research in many parts of Australia, particularly New South Wales, Western Australia and Tasmania, and in Papua New Guinea and Southeast Asia. She is an honours graduate of the University of Sydney with a PhD from the ANU. Past positions include tutor in Prehistory at the University of Papua New Guinea and lecturer in archaeology at the University of New England. From 1983 to 2007 she was Professor of Archaeology at the University of Western Australia, and continues as Emeritus Professor and Senior Honorary Research Fellow at that institution. Her ongoing research interests are focused on the archaeology and history of the Tasmanian Aborigines, the Pleistocene archaeology of southern China and the evolutionary significance of cannibalism.

ABSTRACTPhotographs of Tasmanian Aborigines at Oyster Cove c.1858A collection of photographs attributed to Bishop Nixon, first Anglican bishop in Van Diemen’s Land, depicts Tasmanian Aboriginal people at an establishment at Oyster Cove, south of Hobart, Tasmania. They are all dated to 1858. It seems unlikely that they were all taken by Nixon, and that they were all taken at the same time, but they are generally known as Nixon’s Oyster Cove photographs of 1858. They comprise at least 21 photos, of an overall 50 photographs of Tasmanian Aboriginal people from the 19th century. They have not been well studied, and no catalogue exists, despite pioneering work by Julia Clark at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, and recent research by Indigenous Tasmanian artist-scholar Julie Gough. The Oyster Cove collection is very different from other “ethnographic” photographs of Indigenous people, globally, in Australia, and compared to later photographs of some of the same people.About three or four of the Oyster Cove photographs have been republished again and again, usually with misleading captions and identifications, where there have been any. They have been deployed to represent particular views, particularly the constant labelling of them as “The Last of the Tasmanians”. I want to look at the complete set overall, in the context of the other known photographs, with respect to the possibility of a richer reading of them, including their significance for the modern Aboriginal community in Tasmania. Despite the “Last of the Tasmanians” captions, these photos include images of ancestors of the modern community. Most of the individuals can be identified, and biographical detail about each is available, which together provide an individuated history of this group from the time of the European invasion until the middle of the nineteenth century.

SYMPOSIUM SPEAKERS FIRST SESSION

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ALISON ATKINSON-PHILLIPS

BIOGRAPHYAlison Atkinson-Phillips is a PhD Candidate with the University of Technology Sydney, based across the country in Perth, WA. She is supervised by Professor Paula Hamilton from the Australian Centre for Public History and is interested in public memorials and commemorative public art, particularly works which acknowledge loss and trauma not primarily related to death. Alison’s research project includes an online map of non-death memorials across Australia which can be found on her blog www.notacelebration.blogspot.com. Atkinson-Phillips completed her BA at Curtin University during the nineteen nineties, including honours research into the public art of the East Perth redevelopment. She has spent the last decade working as a communications professional and religious journalist for the Uniting Church before re-entering academic life. Alison can be found on twitter at @alia_p

ABSTRACTDifficult Knowledge in the Landscape: What difference does art make? Australia’s colonial and post-colonial history abounds in ‘difficult knowledge’, a term which acknowledges the kinds of traumatic histories often dealt with in Anne Ferran’s work and by other artists interested in uncovering the silenced stories of marginalised people. There is an ethics of care associated with bringing such histories to light, which must be negotiated by artists whether they work within museum or gallery settings or, as is increasingly the case, through formal public art processes to create public memorials. In either case, the artist brings to acts of commemoration an approach which moves beyond a simple history lesson, often creating affect in a way art theorist Jill Bennett has described as “the means by which a kind of understanding is produced” (Bennett 2005:36). Using case studies from the Australian context, this presentation will explore the ways artist have engaged with difficult knowledge in order to create an entry point for a journey.

JESSICA NEATH

BIOGRAPHYJessica Neath will complete her PhD in art history at Monash University in May, 2014. She was awarded the 2013 John Barrett Award for Australian Studies (Postgraduate Category) for her paper Empty lands: contemporary art approaches to photographing historical trauma in Tasmania published in the Journal of Australian Studies in 2012.

ABSTRACTPhotographs and memorials of absenceAnne Ferran uses photography in unexpected ways to document archaeological and architectural remains and reveal neglected aspects of Australia’s colonial past. The artist pays particular attention to the gaps and silences that punctuate the historical record and works with these absences to give them material form. The artwork Lost to Worlds (2008), made at the heritage site of a convict female factory in Tasmania, pictures the lack of visible historical markers in a series of landscape photographs. Transformed by the artist’s photographic treatment this lack becomes a resounding emptiness that fills the artwork. Positioning an empty landscape as memorial sits in stark contrast to the tradition of making landscapes remember with the addition of upright, permanent monuments. There is a correlation between Ferran’s use of absence and recent public memorial projects, which also reject the logic of presence underpinning traditional monuments. These emerging memorial languages indicate the need for new ways to remember troubled pasts.

SYMPOSIUM SPEAKERS SECOND SESSIONALISTAIR PATERSON

BIOGRAPHYProfessor Alistair Paterson is an archaeologist at the University of Western Australia and Head of the School of Social Sciences. In 2010-2012 he was Discipline Chair of Archaeology, and during that time with Jane Balme, Acting Director of the Centre for Rock Art Research + Management. His research and teaching covers culture contact, historical archaeology in maritime and terrestrial settings, European colonization, historical rock art, and archaeological and historical methodology. Much of his work is now located in Western Australia, including regional studies of Australia’s Northwest, the uses of coast and offshore islands in colonial and pre-colonial settings (in collaboration with the Western Australian Museum, iVec), and early colonial settlements across the state. He is lead Chief Investigator on Shipwrecks of the Roaring Forties: A Maritime Archaeological Reassessment of some of Australia’s Earliest Shipwrecks. He is a Chief Investigator on the Australian Research Council Discovery Project; The Barrow Island Archaeology Project and on the ARC Linkage Project; Southeast Asia’s Global Economy Climate & the Impact of Natural Hazards from the 10th to 21st Centuries. He is the author of A Millennium of Cultural Contact (Left Coast, 2011), The Lost Legions: Culture Contact in Colonial Australia (Alta Mira, 2008) and editor with Jane Balme of Archaeology in Practice: A Student Guide to Archaeological Analyses (2nd edition, Blackwell Publishing, 2013). In 2009 he was based in Copenhagen as Honorary Visiting Fellow at the University of Copenhagen and at the National Museum. He is past President of the Australian Archaeological Association (2005-2007), and has been involved with editing for, and publishing in, key archaeology journals including Antiquity, World Archaeology, Historical Archaeology, Archaeology in Oceania, Australasian Historical Archaeology, Internet Archaeology and Australian Archaeology.

ABSTRACTArt and Contemporary Archaeology: 2014ADAnne Ferran’s work uses the stuff of archaeology – heritage sites, archives and objects – to produce her art. Perhaps even the mapping of names on places parallels the attempts of archaeologists to give voices to past ‘hidden majority’. Ferran’s art reminds us of the contemporary trend to use heritage sites and heritage ‘sites’ and archaeological ‘methods’ to produce art. The development of ‘contemporary archaeology’, in particular, highlights the ways in which the line between archaeology and art is blurred. For example, in 1999/2000 the Tate Thames Dig saw the artist Mark Dion and field workers collect material from the foreshore of the Thames River in London and present the found objects in a ‘museum cabinet’ complete with ‘field notes’ in the Tate. Other work such as that through Ruin Memories project specifically unites photographic art and archaeology to highlight how the “modern condition also produces its own ruined materialities, its own marginalised pasts”.