Events

CHAIRPERSON

Dr Connor Graham, Asia Research Institute, and Tembusu College, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

It seems a delicious irony that due to a recent Australian High Court ruling (27 October 2017) many Australian MPs, including the Deputy Prime Minister, are now ineligible to sit in parliament. Known as the “citizenship seven” case, the unfolding citizenship crisis in Australia has the potential to allow for radical constructions of (Australian) subjectivities to emerge, bringing to light a manifold of plays upon and reflections of our global predicament, where displacement threatens our ‘implacement’ (Casey 1993, 2016) at our every turn.

While bearing witness to the government crumbling into chaos, we can more fully understand the present as a precarious, contested state, which also presents fresh opportunities to develop a more critical transnational consciousness. With this in mind, this paper shines a light into the particular Tasmanian predicament, drawing upon provocative art works and cultural manifestations that have attempted to address (and decolonise) the hackneyed post-colonial scenario of the Island state (Tasmania). That is, Tasmanian Aboriginal politics – the ongoing dispute about who actually qualifies as and who determines (Palawa) aboriginality.

Reaching beyond politics, this inquiry instead points to how a deeper engagement with such topical issues of nationality can occur through the examination of cultural practices which include aesthetic, transcendental and speculative customs. In selecting, digitising, and analysing key materials, this analysis provides the opportunity to reflect on the problems and possibilities of the ‘postcolonial archive’ (Shetty and Bellamy 2000, after Spivak 1988), a concept that has yet to be widely taken up in digital culture and art. Examining specific cultural instances that have manifested and triggered debates, for instance, the 2014 Aboriginal DNA Test performance installation at the Museum of New and Old Art, among others, we can see how such syncretic trajectories allow us to understand distinct phases in the singular engagement of uneven and combined decolonisation’s in the Island state. This paper draws upon an array of critical viewpoints, which embrace both highly political and deeply personal fictions, allowing us to ponder what might be over the horizon.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Nancy Mauro-Flude is Assistant Professor at the Communications and New Media Department, National University Singapore. She is Director of the 21C Art Forms Curating and Cultural Leadership Program. Mauro-Flude’s work explores how we articulate the resonances and dissonances between performing arts and computer science, within the context of the contemporary art. She specialises in networked systems, performance studies, embodied interaction, and transdisciplinary artforms. Her research draws on continental feminist philosophy and critical media studies, to investigate the manifestations and transformations driven by the aesthetics politics and function of technology in culture. Her research methodologies include ethnography, discourse analysis and semiotics. Mauro Flude has written, devised and curated extensively within the field of networked media and computational design.

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