East Timor installations and images.
1995.
| Oil Salt Distance. In 1995, I was invited on short notice to develop a work for East Timor a Voice a Future, that was to be shown in conjunction with the World Congress for the Arts and Drama in Brisbane. East Timor is a typical post colonial site of contestation, big business oil deals, international and domestic political manipulation and social engineering. I was uncomfortable about buying into working on the exhibition until a Timorese woman living in Brisbane provided me with a number of Timorese peoples personal stories, photographs and with lists of people missing and confirmed dead by Amnesty International and other organizations.Amnesty International had been given 'limited space' for the exhibition, at the Information and Technology Building at QUT Gardens Point, as long as it did not interrupt the main event. |  |
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Initially I proposed a collaborative piece with East Timorese people, that would stretch along the corridors, combining written stories and photographs with Timorese people, stopping passers-by and relating their stories. Due to time and funding restraints, the work eventually was developed into a video projection installation.Taking advantage of its site, it was set up so that all participants in he World Arts and Drama Congress would have to pass through it, in the corridors to get to seminars. No distance from the work was possible, the multiple projections were very close projecting on bodies negotiating the spaces/corridors.The work operates via a video projection onto acetate sheets coated with oil and salt. The names of individuals, missing Timorese people are very present in this work.They float constantly behind all of the other projected representations of the East Timor situation |
| .The names contrast to mass media television representations of genocide, in which the individuals names are so often missing or just massed as a spectacle for television of unknown humanity between the ads, (60minutes style) consume and forget.John Pilger's Death of a Nation, footage of the Santa Cruz 'incident' and Max Stahls images of Timor, banal but relevant advertisements are cut and pasted with all the other faces that claim authority on East Timor.Interviews with everyone from Henry Kissinger and Ali Alitas, Gareth Evans, Paul Keating even Noam Chomsky are seen on the surface but not heard in the work.Only one section 3m wide by 1.8m high of the complete work could be shown in Causal Connections at the Palace Gallery in Brisbane, on the evening of the East Timor, World Court sitting in the Hague |  |
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In
Direct Sun at the Noosa Regional Gallery Tewantin. Obviously
in a gallery space the work was situated very differently but it is
still quite 'coercive.' I developed further 'political' installation
works such as Shadow Play based on representations/events
coming out of East Timor. the shadow puppets are the representational
forms used in parts of indonesia like Java. They traditionally played
a strong part in informing and forming culture.Ironically the Javanese
are the people being used by the Indonesian government to recolonise
East Timor, while carrying on a systematic 'ethnic cleansing' of the
Timorese people.This work consists of projections of wayang puppet
character Rama and political figures like General Mantiri, a single
chair swinging in space with six hammocks/shrouds in suspension above.
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Skywalkers - The image opposite was a concept 'drawing' for a large scale billboard print installation work to coincide with the visit of Ali Alitas to meet with Gareth Evans in Australia following the signing of the Timor Gap Treaty in a chartered jet Acknowledgement.
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