Contributors

CONTRIBUTING ARTISTS

Megan Cope is a Quandamooka woman from North Stradbroke Island in South East Queensland who lives and works in Brisbane. Her site-specific sculptural installations, video work and paintings explore the myths and methods of colonisation. Her diverse practice also investigates issues relating to identity, the environment, and mapping practices. Cope’s work has been exhibited in Australia and internationally, including at Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art; Gold Coast City Art Gallery; MONA FOMA, Hobart; ARC Biennial, Brisbane; Cairns Regional Art Gallery; Koori Heritage Trust, Melbourne; City Gallery, Wellington; Para Site Contemporary Art Space, Hong Kong; Careof Art Space, Milan; the Australian Embassy, Washington and Next Wave Festival, 2014. Cope was commissioned to create major site-specific works at Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, 2013; as well as for the Melbourne Museum, 2015. Cope is a member of Aboriginal art collective proppaNOW.

Carl Gerber, born 1985 in Mainz, studied screenwriting between 2007-2013 at the Filmhochschule Ludwigsburg. During his studies, prize-winning short films were based on his books, including Synkope, which was nominated for the Deutsche Kurzfilmpreis. His short stories Die Untersuchung des Auges and Erster Erste were published with Primero Verlag. In 2012, Gerber led a film workshop on the Turkish-Syrian border for Syrian refugee children. He is part of the Berlin-based Newsgroup Afghanistan, which has facilitated exhibitions, a theatre piece and a publication on the topics of home, flight and the German asylum process. Since 2013, Gerber works as a performance dramaturg. His works have been shown at Sophiensälen Berlin, Ballhaus Ost Berlin and the Harburger Bahnhof, among others. His first full-length film, 24 Weeks, was the only German contribution for the 66th Berlinale competition. After touring festivals and cinemas in over 30 countries, the film was nominated four times for the German Film Prize in 2017, including for Best Screenplay. The film won the “Silver Lola” award.

Archie Moore (Kamilaroi. Born 1970, Toowoomba, lives Brisbane) works across media in portrayals of self and national histories. His ongoing interests include key signifiers of identity – skin, language, smell, home, flags – as well as the borders of intercultural understanding and misunderstanding, including the wider concerns of racism. Uncertainty is an ongoing theme pertaining to his paternal Kamilaroi heritage. Moore completed his Bachelor of Visual Arts at Queensland University of Technology in 1998. In 2001, he was awarded the Millennial Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship which enabled him to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. He has held regular solo exhibitions of his work for two decades in university, not-for-profit and commercial galleries across Australia, as well as being invited to present a solo show in Japan and a two-person show in the UK. He has been commissioned for the 3rd National Indigenous Art Triennale and the 20th Biennale of Sydney.

Sonya Schönberger is a Berlin-based German artist whose practice is strongly influenced by historical themes in connection with biographical memories that have been marked by a break, often in political systems. Many of her works have developed out of various archives that she has created or found over the last years. Alongside these, Schönberger also works with the changing public space in Berlin due to political and social shifts. She works with formats such as photography, theatre, installations, publications etc.. Her works have been exhibited internationally, including in the USA, Iran, Pakistan, Israel and Canada. Sonya Schönberger is represented by Katharina Maria Raab Gallery.

Sumugan Sivanesan (Berlin/Sydney) is an anti-disciplinary cultural producer. Often working collaboratively his interests span histories of anticolonialism, activist media, intentional communities and resilient networks, non-human rights and extinctions. He has worked alongside the (former) refugee and media figure Sanjeev ‘Alex’ Kuhendrarajah (2013–2018) on a series of texts and artworks to critique the ‘proper processes’ of refugee determination and re-settlement. With artist and writer Tessa Zettel he began the artistic/urban research program ‘Plan Bienen’ (2014–ongoing) to speculate on the overlap of dwindling bee populations and economic precariousness in the cultural capital of Berlin. He was a part of the experimental documentary collective theweathergroup_U (2008–2012) who worked in the confluence of the burgeoning carbon economy and Aboriginal land rights in Australia, and the media/art gang boat-people.org (2001–ongoing) who instigated public interventions and events to argue with successive Australian governments’ draconian border policies and nationalist narratives. He earned a doctorate from the Transforming Cultures research centre at the University of Technology Sydney (2014) and was a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute for English and American Studies (Cultural Studies), University of Potsdam (2016).

Simone van Dijken’s (NL) work consists of writing, painting, drawing, and performance, and currently questions hierarchies and vulnerabilities in relation to the body. Van Dijken’s own physical presence and voice are the starting point for understanding the body as a symbolic and political entity, marked by gender, power dynamics, and clothing – or rather protection. By repeatedly painting similar elements, extracted from a spatial and emotional proximity (a second hand V-neck sweater, for instance), she works and re-works visual familiarity, letting recognition fade out. Associative junctions are being layered: spray paint over oil paint, ashes over pigments. Her performances are collages of spoken word and guitar noise. Simone van Dijken was a Researcher Fine Arts at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht, Netherlands, and received the Lower Saxony Dorothea-Erxleben-Stipend for painting. She was visiting lecturer at the University of Arts in Braunschweig. She lives and works in Berlin.

Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll is an artist, writer and the Professorial Chair of Global Art at the University of Birmingham. Her practise explores how to intervene ethically and experimentally within neoliberal institutions. This form of infrastructural activism and institutional disobedience, together with the employment of site specific installation strategies questions the market’s grip on both art and research and reflects on the intersections of both in the performances, videos, and books. Khadija is the author of the books Art in the Time of Colony; The Importance of Being Anachronistic: Contemporary Aboriginal Art and Museum Reparations; and Botanical Drift: Plant Protagonists of the Invasive Herbarium. She has shown her work on issues of surveillance, extraterritorial asylum and embassies at Savvy; Haus der Kulturen der Welt; and Silver Sehnsucht during Frieze London. She wrote her Ph.D. at Harvard University about appropriations of the colonial archive and her installations and texts have been exhibited internationally, including at the Venice and Marrakech Biennales. She is the recipient of fellowships from the DAAD, Humboldt Stiftung, and is an editor of the journal Third Text.

 

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

Ben Gook (AU/DE) is an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at Humboldt Universität, Berlin. He also holds an honorary position at the University of Melbourne, as a Fellow in the School of Social and Political Sciences. He received his PhD in Social Theory and Cultural Studies from the University of Melbourne in 2014. He researches contemporary politics, economy and culture, with a focus on social change after the Fall of the Berlin Wall. His first book is Divided Subjects, Invisible Borders: Re- unified Germany after 1989 (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015). He has also written on Australian culture, including “Australian Postcolonial Trauma and Silences in Samson and Delilah,” (Scars and Wounds: Trauma on Film in National and International Contexts, 2017) and “…With Ears for Landscape: Australian Soundscapes,” Crossings (2006). His essay “Lest we Forget; Let us Forget” (2013) responded to Nothing to See Here by Amy Spiers and Catherine Ryan at Sydney’s Underbelly Arts Festival.

Raelee Lancaster is a Brisbane-based poet, and a research assistant with Macquarie University. She has performed at literary events and festivals around Australia and her work has featured in Rabbit, Scum Mag, Voiceworks, and other print and online media. In 2018, Raelee’s poetry was awarded first place for the Nakata Brophy Short Fiction and Poetry Prize for Young Indigenous Writers. Raised on Awabakal land, Raelee has connections to the Wiradjuri nation.

Sarah Keenan is Senior Lecturer at Birkbeck Law School and co-director of the Centre for Research on Race and Law. Originally trained as a lawyer in Australia, her research uses feminist and critical race theories to rethink questions of space, property and identity. Her book ‘Subversive Property: Law and the Production of Spaces of Belonging’ was published by Routledge in 2014, and she is currently a Leverhulme Fellow working on her project ‘Making Land Liquid: The Temporality of Land Title Registration’.

Peter Monteath is Professor of History at Flinders University in Adelaide. He has taught at The University of Queensland, Deakin University, The University of Western Australia, The University of Adelaide and Flinders University. He has also been a Visiting Professor at The University of St Louis Missouri and the Technical University of Berlin, where he was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow. His research interests lie broadly in the areas of modern German and modern Australian history, and in the connections between them. His best-known book is POW: Australian Prisoners of War in Hitler’s Reich (Sydney 2011). In 2015 he published, with co-author Valerie Munt, a biography of the anthropologist Fred Rose under the title Red Professor: The Cold War Life of Fred Rose. The book, based on extensive work in Australian and German archives, was short-listed for the Prime Minister’s History Prize in 2016. Currently Peter Monteath is teaching and researching German history at Flinders University; he is also President of the History Council of South Australia.

Nathan “mudyi” Sentance is a Wiradjuri creative producer who works to ensure that the cultural and historical narratives conveyed by cultural and memory institutions, such galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM) have First Nations perspectives and that First Nations stories being told are being told and controlled by First Nations people. This is to balance the biases and misinterpretations of Aboriginal culture and people that has been previously set by GLAM institutions. Nathan was also a participant in the 2017 Wesfarmers/NGA Indigenous Arts Leadership program and is currently the convener of the Australian Society of Archivists, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Special Interest Group. He produced Ngalu Warrawi Marri (we stand strong), the Invasion Day protest event at Australian Museum, and assisted in curating the upcoming Gadi exhibition at the Australian Museum and is a invited speaker the Museums Galleries Australia Conference for 2018.

 

curatorial advisor

Rachel O’Reilly (Brisbane/Berlin) is an artist, writer, curator and educator (Dutch Art Institute) whose work explores relationships between art and situated cultural practice, aesthetic philosophy, and political economy. She was a resident at the Jan van Eyck Akademie, curator at the Australian Cinematheque and Fifth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art where she archived the films of Kumar Shahani, and more recently co-curated ‘Infrastructural Rifts: Souls and Soils of Disaster Developmentalism’ for DAI Roaming Academy, and ‘Planetary Records: Performing Justice between Art and Law’ for Contour Biennale, Mechelen. Publications include: ‘Neutrality: From the Letter from Melos to Non-Aligned Movement(s)’ with Jelena Vesić (Haus der Kunst Goethe Fellow) and Vladimir Jerić Vlidi, and ‘Infrastructures of Autonomy on the Professional Frontier: Art and the Boycott of/as Art’, with Danny Butt, Journal of Aesthetics and Protest. Her artistic work and research on unconventional extractivism has been presented at the Institute of Modern Art, Eflux, Van Abbemuseum, Qalandiya International, Savvy Contemporary, Tate Liverpool, and as part of Frontier Imaginaries. Her commitment to curatorial ethics is recognized by her advisory role to the Place, Ground and Practice group of the International Society for Electronic Arts, and her invitation to Future South(s), an online dialogical network of artists, curators, theorists, and historians hosted by UNSW. Her writing has been published by Cambridge Scholars Press, MIT Press, Postcolonial Studies, Eflux Journal and in networked e-books.

 

HOSTING ARTIST

Sonja Hornung is a visual artist who grew up and studied in Melbourne, Australia. In 2012, she moved to Berlin to undertake a Masters at the Berlin-Weißensee School of Art. In her artistic practice she often attempts to insert emancipated forms into pre-existing orders. After moving to Berlin in 2012, she spent two years attempting to convince embassies to replace their national flags with a flag with no meaning (Emptying flags, with Neue Berliner Räume, 2012-2014). Her work has since been shown at institutions and project spaces such as Forum Stadtpark (2018, Graz), Art Encounters Biennale (2017, Timisoara), Kunstverein Harburg (2017), Bonn Theater (2017), District Berlin (2016), Maxim Gorki Theater (Berlin, 2016), Ivan Gallery (Bucharest, 2015), Kunsthaus Dahlem (Berlin, 2015) and Friday Exit (Vienna, 2014). She was a recipient of the Melbourne National Scholarship (2005-10) and the Mart Stam Studio Scholarship (2016), and has been funded by the Australian Copyright Agency (2015), the European Cultural Foundation (2015), Kunstförderung Steiermark, Austria (2017-18) and the DAAD (2009-10, 2015, 2016). She has additionally written reviews and cultural commentary for Frieze, Berlin Art Link, Artleaks Gazette and ArtSlant Berlin.