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66 whose land is it? 8 July – 19 September pen Eye Gallery In Australia it is now increasingly common for email signatures to include an acknowledgement of the first nations community on whose land one lives and works. This is typically accompanied by an assertion of the fact that ‘sovereignty was never ceded’. This shift in everyday culture points to the fact that it is now next to impossible to engage in discussions or representations of landscape in Australia without considering vital questions of denied Indigenous sovereignty and colonialism. The exhibition Whose Land is It? at the Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool provides a reflection on the ongoing legacies of these processes and the ways they manifest in contemporary Australian photographic practice. Featuring the works of artists Atong Atem, James Tylor, and Amanda Williams, each work included in the exhibition is underscored by a sense of photography as being instrumental to the violent process of othering colonial subjects. The first works the audience encounters entering the exhibition are James Tylor’s black and white photographs of the Murray-Darling Basin in South Eastern Australia. Entitled Economics of Water, Tylor’s series documents the mismanagement of Australia’s largest river system by successive local and federal governments. Despite their varying dimensions, each of Tylor’s photographs are obscured by gold geometric shapes that extend out beyond the photograph and onto the gallery walls. Reminiscent of buffering images that have failed to load, these gold shapes operate in direct opposition to the documentary photographs they overlay. Whilst accompanying wall text explains that these geometric shapes symbolise the former wealth of the land, the gold obstructive forms might just as easily represent the prioritisation of industry and economy over community, and environmental wellbeing. Produced within a few years of the completion of a royal commission that was scathing in its report of governmental mis-management, Tyler’s works reflect how the Basin (14% of Australia’s land area) has been the locus of a complex interaction between public policy, climate politics, and disputed claims of sovereignty over land (by state/federal governments and First Nations communities). With the the royal commission report in mind, one can’t help but question where the wealth generated by the mismanagement of the land has accrued – given the movement of capital, as likely to be in the UK as Australia – and Installation view of Economics of Water by James Tylor From the series Monstera Obliqua by Atong Atem From the series Monstera Obliqua by Atong Atem
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exhibitions 67 Installation view of the series Nichols Gorge Walk, Kosciuszko National Park by Amanda Williams. where the responsibility falls for restitution and repair. Continuing the curatorial thread of obstruction is the work of Atong Atem. An artist of South Sudanese heritage living in Naarm (Melbourne), Atem’s work focuses the aesthetic strategies used by young migrants to braid together local and transnational cultural influences. Atem’s series Monstera Obliqua (2021) combines previously unseen portraits, and documentation of the artist’s daily local walks (primarily through foraged flora) during Covid lockdown. Atem’s work is introduced in the space with text which explains that the series considers ‘…how and where black folk exist, feel comfortable, feel natural, and feel welcome…’ and the role of photography in this process. This is a significant as the images in Monstera Obliqua call to mind visual histories and practices of colonialism (namely botanical studies and photographic portraits) that imposed a sense of ‘natural order’ over bodies and landscapes. When considered alongside the fact that the series was produced during a protracted period of intensive lockdown in Melbourne, the visual legacies underscoring these images present an important question – namely, what are the visual processes we enact in order to connect to place? And, how is this negotiated in a context of settler colonialism? Refusing to identify the people in her portraits, or to identify specific geographical details in her work, the strength of Atem’s piece comes in the fact that it ultimately operates as a subtle subversion of colonial visual histories and photography’s role within them. The engagement with found objects and the historical legacy of photography as colonial instrument is also evident in Amanda Williams’ series Nichols Gorge Walk, Kosciuszko National Park (2021). Using fogged paper (in some cases decades old) and expired chemicals, Williams’ faint black and white photographs capture the empty landscape of Kosciuszko as through it is in the process of disappearance. Describing her work as a ‘feminist landscape’, Williams’ photographs obscure any attempts to survey the land and to pinpoint specific geographies, thereby undermining the capacity of photography to operate as an instrument of surveillance and control. Devoid of allegory and with the clarity of the images removed, Williams’ photographs are milky and ghostly in appearance, evoking a distant and faded memory – one that is as melancholic as it is menacing. This feeling is amplified by the large-scale of Williams’ landscape images that immediately called to mind Australian Impressionist painting (for example Arthur Streeton’s seminal 1891 work Fire’s On). Australian Impressionism has been understood as creating a distinct national art movement by focusing on the vastness of the landscape and, latterly, for forging a lingering image of Australian identity that obscures colonial realities. Drawing reference both to photographic processes of surveillance and control, and the fraught legacy of landscape within Australian art history, Williams’ works prompt a powerful enquiry into how visualisation over the landscape reflects systems of power. As an Australian living in the UK, I walked away from Whose Land is It? struck by the poignancy of the location of the exhibition – the Liverpool waterfront being the gateway to Britain’s industrial and colonial past. Whilst an exhibition centred on the issue of land ownership would have undoubtedly benefited from the inclusion of a First Nations artist, Whose Land is It? is to be commended for the showcasing a diverse and exciting new generation of Australian photographic artists, and for the sensitive handling of layered histories of dispossession and geographical entanglements, and the role of photography within them. — Chrisoula Lionis

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exhibitions

67

Installation view of the series Nichols Gorge Walk, Kosciuszko National Park by Amanda Williams.

where the responsibility falls for restitution and repair. Continuing the curatorial thread of obstruction is the work of Atong Atem. An artist of South Sudanese heritage living in Naarm (Melbourne), Atem’s work focuses the aesthetic strategies used by young migrants to braid together local and transnational cultural influences. Atem’s series Monstera Obliqua (2021) combines previously unseen portraits, and documentation of the artist’s daily local walks (primarily through foraged flora) during Covid lockdown. Atem’s work is introduced in the space with text which explains that the series considers ‘…how and where black folk exist, feel comfortable, feel natural, and feel welcome…’ and the role of photography in this process. This is a significant as the images in Monstera Obliqua call to mind visual histories and practices of colonialism (namely botanical studies and photographic portraits) that imposed a sense of ‘natural order’ over bodies and landscapes. When considered alongside the fact that the series was produced during a protracted period of intensive lockdown in Melbourne, the visual legacies underscoring these images present an important question – namely, what are the visual processes we enact in order to connect to place? And, how is this negotiated in a context of settler colonialism? Refusing to identify the people in her portraits, or to identify specific geographical details in her work, the strength of Atem’s piece comes in the fact that it ultimately operates as a subtle subversion of colonial visual histories and photography’s role within them. The engagement with found objects and the historical legacy of photography as colonial instrument is also evident in Amanda Williams’ series Nichols Gorge Walk, Kosciuszko National Park (2021). Using fogged paper (in some cases decades old) and expired chemicals, Williams’ faint black and white photographs capture the empty landscape of Kosciuszko as through it is in the process of disappearance. Describing her work as a ‘feminist landscape’, Williams’ photographs obscure any attempts to survey the land and to pinpoint specific geographies, thereby undermining the capacity of photography to operate as an instrument of surveillance and control. Devoid of allegory and with the clarity of the images removed, Williams’ photographs are milky and ghostly in appearance, evoking a distant and faded memory – one that is as melancholic as it is menacing. This feeling is amplified by the large-scale of Williams’ landscape images that immediately called to mind Australian Impressionist painting (for example Arthur Streeton’s seminal 1891 work Fire’s On). Australian Impressionism has been understood as creating a distinct national art movement by focusing on the vastness of the landscape and, latterly, for forging a lingering image of Australian identity that obscures colonial realities. Drawing reference both to photographic processes of surveillance and control, and the fraught legacy of landscape within Australian art history, Williams’ works prompt a powerful enquiry into how visualisation over the landscape reflects systems of power.

As an Australian living in the UK, I walked away from Whose Land is It? struck by the poignancy of the location of the exhibition – the Liverpool waterfront being the gateway to Britain’s industrial and colonial past. Whilst an exhibition centred on the issue of land ownership would have undoubtedly benefited from the inclusion of a First Nations artist, Whose Land is It? is to be commended for the showcasing a diverse and exciting new generation of Australian photographic artists, and for the sensitive handling of layered histories of dispossession and geographical entanglements, and the role of photography within them.

— Chrisoula Lionis

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