We, Us, Them

A yard with white walls and fruit trees, with assembled cooking pots and gas bottles – a domestic space, a home. A young woman floats in a river, as her hair floats and splays across the surface – she is above, but also captured by, the deep brown waters. A woman breaths out, her breath etching the glass in front of her – an indelible mark of presence. Hands form intricate shapes, caught in movement, language and motion intertwined. A dancer’s body extends in a leap, rigid, and at the same time, supple – a temporary form made permanent. These impressions form the multifaceted artistic response to pressing questions of identity, community and collaboration explored in We, Us, Them.

Attempts to capture or encapsulate smaller communities and groups are often predicated upon power structures that essentialise and flatten – the artists featured in We, Us, Them approach this representation from a rich variety of viewpoints, charting multiple expressions of group and community identity, whilst also exploring the basis of collaboration. What does collaboration mean for empowering groups? What can be achieved in amplifying rarely heard voices in contemporary photography? What do the foundational concepts within contemporary practice (such as the archive, documentation and collaboration) mean for the creation of community?

We, Us, Them is supported by the UK/Australia Season Patrons Board, the British Council, and the Australian Government as part of the UK/Australia Season.

Raphaela Rosella’s project is supported by Rachel Verghis, with
additional support by the Australia Council for the Arts, Photographic Museum of Humanity, Ian Potter Cultural Trust, John Weiley and Adrian Williams.

Working in Tjuntjuntjara, in the Great Victoria Desert, WA, Michelle Anderson, Katy Brown, Sophia Brown, Maureen Donegan, Timo Hogan (with Louise Allerton) will present recently produced photographic and video work exploring their community’s existing sign language usage, a language that has existed alongside spoken Pitjantjatjara language forever. Producing their work in collaboration with Milpa Space, Spinifex Arts Project, this body of work is driven by the next generation of young artists in Tjuntjuntjara, and reflects this new generation’s interest in digital photography and video.

Timo Hogan grew up in and around Spinifex country, from Mt Margaret, Warburton to Tjuntjuntjara. He is a fluent speaker of three desert languages and is a leader amongst the younger generation of artists. After a break from painting due to cultural obligations Timo made a successful return with his 2019 work “Lake Baker” which was selected for the 2019 Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Awards and won the 2021 award. He recently had a hugely acclaimed solo show at Outstation Gallery. Timo now paints full time with the Spinifex Arts Project and works with Milpa as a side project.

Recent exhibitions include Explosion, Aboriginal Signature Gallery, Brussels, Belgium (2019), 36th Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards, Museum and Art Gallery of NT. Darwin. NT (2019), Journey through Culture, for Tarnanthi Festival in conjunction with Redot Gallery and Northspace Adelaide 2019 – Desert Mob 2019, Araluen Arts Centre, Alice Springs, Northern Territory (2019). Hogan was a recipient of the 2021 Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards.

Maureen Donegan grew up on Spinifex country, in the far east of WA. She has been painting and making craft objects for many years with the Women’s Centre at Tjuntjuntjara. She now works as an Arts worker and painter at the Spinifex Arts Project centre. She has recently worked at the Milpa Space on sign language video works. Maureen is a fluent Pitjantjtjara speaker, her first language.

Michelle Anderson descends from a long line of successful Spinifex artists, crafts people, and traditional owners. She grew up in Connana and Tjuntjuntjara communities playing an active role in cultural life and caring for elders. She has recently been working at the Milpa Space & the Spinifex Arts Project engaging with photo media sign language stories. She is a fluent speaker of Pitjantjatjara.

Katy Brown has been working and painting with the Spinifex Arts project. Her painting works have sold through smaller networks rather than larger galleries. She has been instrumental in the Milpa Project Space and the sign language project Mara Wangkapai. She is fluent in three desert languages and a brilliant teacher of language and culture. Through the MW project her manual language and teaching skills have become invaluable.

Sophia Brown is an arts worker/artist at Spinifex Arts Project, currently working on Mara Wangkapia-Pitjantjtjara hand signs.

This project is supported by the Australia Council for the Arts and Anglo Gold Ashanti.

Cate Consandine’s video work Her Arrival explores the binary conditions of restraint and release, aggression and refuge, contraction and openness. Informed by the physicality of a community of senior female dancers, and acting as an archive of dance form and function, the work celebrates an repository of movement stored – a commemoration of a community of energy, kinetics and the strength of age.

Melbourne-based artist Cate Consandine works across a wide range of formal and discursive mediums including sculpture and spatial practice, film and performance. She works with the body as material for her practice, and is particularly interested in the physical expression of psychological states, the relationships between bodies and space, and their contingent emotional registers. Acts of cutting, and the resulting fragment or part-object, are often utilised as an editing and performing strategy in the moving image, and as a reductive strategy central to the sculptural process.

Cate Consandine has exhibited nationally and internationally since 1999. Recent solo exhibitions include: Her/e, Sarah Scout Presents (2018); Cut Colony, Contemporary Projects Gallery, Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney (2012); Colony, Sarah Scout Presents (2010); Candy Cane, Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne and Cold Cut, Eye-Stalk, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne (both 2006).

Consandine has presented major collaborative projects including The Missing with Stephen Garrett, Conical, Melbourne (2011); Wayfinder with Sound Designer Nick Murray, Conical (2003); and the set design for In-Finite, part of the Australian Ballet’s Bodytorque Season, Sydney Theatre Wharf (2013). Curated exhibitions include the Wandering Eye (2016) and Without Words: Photography and Emotion (2011), both at Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne. International exhibitions include LOOP 08, International Festival & Fair for Video Art, Barcelona (2008); Contemporary Australian Video, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2008); Bibibibodibiboo Exposition international d’art actuel, Biennale of Art, Reunion Island (2009 and 2014); Vertigo, an Asialink Arts and BLINDSIDE touring exhibition, Galeri Soemardja, Indonesia;  Museum of Contemporary Art, Taiwan; and POSCO Art Gallery, South Korea. In 2002-2004 she was the recipient of a Gertrude Studio Residency.

Anu Kumar will present the first exhibition drawn out of her personal archive of photography documenting her experience as an Australian of Indian descent. A reflection on the understanding of place, and the position of diasporic communities, Kumar’s intensely personal documentative photography acts as a lyrical celebration of her extended family, and the importance of place and home.

Anu Kumar is an Indian-Australian documentary photographer, based in Melbourne, Australia. Anu is captivated by diversity in culture and circumstance, and seeks to portray these alternate realities through the humble beauty in peoples’ unexpected and everyday moments. She appreciates the rare glimpse her photography allows into strangers’ lives, and wishes to capture their reality with sincerity to encourage viewers to reflect and engage with foreign contexts, as human and real. On a personal level, Anu’s photo stories give her the opportunity to connect with her own Indian heritage and explore identity, as a woman born in India and raised in Australia.

Kumar’s works have featured in publications including GUP, It’s Nice That, FotoRoom, The Heavy Collective, Aint-Bad Magazine, Phases Mag, Aserica Magazine (2017) and Coeval Mag (2018). 

Raphaela (Rosie) Rosella, alongside Dayannah Baker Barlow, Kathleen (Rowrow) Duncan, Tricia Whitton and family, will present HOMEtruths – a three-channel video work that seeks to amplify feelings of intimacy, frustration, kinship, and connectedness that circulate between imprisoned people and their loved ones through interactions with the carceral state. As part of their long-form project You’ll Know It When You Feel It, Rosella and her co-creators seek to examine how co-created archives can resist bureaucratic representations of women whose lives intersect with the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC).

Raphaela Rosella is an Australian artist from Nimbin, New South Wales, currently residing in Meanjin (Brisbane). She works in the tradition of long-form photographic storytelling, and more recently in moving image.

In 2014 she was the first Australian woman selected to attend World Press Photo’s prestigious Joop Swart Masterclass in Amsterdam. Her work has been exhibited and screened nationally and internationally including: Photo Biennale Photoquai (France), International Centre for Photography (USA), UNSW Galleries/Australian Centre for Photography (Australia) Noorderlicht Photofestival (Netherlands), Photoville (USA), Reportage Festival (Australia), In/Out Transylvania Photo Festival (Romania) and Zagreb Museum of Contemporary Art for Organ Vida International Photography Festival (Croatia).

Her work has received distinctions including: First Prize (Portrait Singles Category) World Press Photo Contest (2015), Australian Photobook of the Year (Momentro Pro) (2015), finalist of the Moran Photographic Prize (2017) and most recently she was selected as the winner and first recipient of the Photographic Museum of Humanity’s Women’s Photography Grant (2017).

Julie Rrap will present her key recent body of work Blow Back, for the first time outside of New South Wales. These portraits represent a collective performance act that uses breath as an action that is both gentle yet provocative. Operating as a localised form of expression for the community of women artists in Sydney that make up the subjects of the work, the performers open mouths mock the endless images of women posed in this way to suggest their receptivity; like a vessel waiting to be filled.

Julie Rrap has been a major figure in Australian contemporary art for over three decades. Since the mid-1970s, she has worked with photography, painting, sculpture, performance and video in an ongoing project concerned with representations of the body. She has responded to studies on the development of cancer cells by creating moulds of her breasts using frozen milk, and then photographing her breasts and placing the frozen moulds on top of those images. This is an example of her exploration of the relationship between science and art, and how, from her position as an artist, she can bring to our attention serious medical issues.

In 2007, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney held a major retrospective of Rrap’s work titled, Body Double (curated by Victoria Lynn), and in 2011 the Lismore Regional Gallery held a solo show of her work, titled Julie Rrap: Off Balance. Rrap was included in the Australian Show (1988) which toured to the Frankfurter Kunstverein in Germany and major museums in Japan. Other significant group exhibitions include Systems End: Contemporary Art in Australia, which toured Japan and Korea in 1996; Fieldwork: Australian Art 1968 – 2002 at the National Gallery of Victoria (2002), Turbulence: the 3rd Auckland Triennial, Auckland, and Revolutions – Forms That Turn, the 2008 Biennale of Sydney (curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev).

Julie Rrap’s work is held in every major public collection as well as many corporate and private collections. Rrap was selected for the prestigious Clemenger Contemporary Art Award at the National Gallery of Victoria in September 2009. She has won the Hermann’s Art Award for her photograph Overstepping in 2001, the Redlands Art prize for a combined sculpture and photographic work in 2008 and the University of Queensland National Artists’ Self-Portrait Prize for her video work, 360 Degree Self-Portrait, in 2009.

Representing Belfast Exposed, Belfast artists Deirdre Robb and Lesley Cherry will present a hybrid photographic and audio installation, collaboratively developed with Irish Traveller women. Opposing the prejudices experiences by these women the artists created a celebratory and observational response to their cultural values, ways of living, and the future of their communities. Incorporated into the artwork are images from the Belfast Exposed Travellers archive reflecting on their heritage and present-day social issues. This project amplifies the female voices from Traveller communities, and considers their place in history and in shaping their culture and country.