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For example, when you have a space that has that kind of critical edge, you want to say something meaningful and something useful. SG: That’s good, as that was what I really wanted. LG: With regards to this idea of repetition, I also felt that it was about generating discourse around certain issues as a form of catharsis, perhaps in an attempt to find new ways of being …
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I guess you could almost view it as the pathological idea of repetition of working through and toward certain outcomes. Therefore, there is a lot of repetition in the exhibition which is obviously deliberate in a ‘if we all say the same thing at the same time, something might happen or something might change’ kind of way. And I think that while they are oppositional emotions, they are also quite interconnected.Īlso, one of the conceptual approaches that I took was to choose artists that were working through things in a process-driven way. For example, exploring psychological loss and trans-generational trauma. So obviously these are very important emotions and states of being, but I was also interested in the flipside. When I was invited to curate the show, Prime Minister Rudd had just given the national apology and consequently there was lots of talk about reconciliation, post-apology Australia and healing. So this was looking at linguistic, historical, iconographic and even psychological recovery. SG: The main idea for the show at the beginning was really to look at the theme of recovery.
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As curator, did you seek to achieve a thematic consistency or an overall conceptual approach? Both jumped out at me as I walked through the space. LG: There were definitely some key themes that flowed through the show, for example the reclamation of identity and the subversion of historical representations of indigeneity. Four of the six artists that I chose were thirty and under, so I was really looking at it from a youthful contemporary viewpoint. I chose to look at it very much from an Indigenous Australian perspective–though not from this kind of mythological contact between Europeans and Aboriginal people–but from the perspective of the trans-generational trauma that’s passed onto younger people. Stephen Gilchrist: The exhibition explores, in an activist key, what we choose to remember and what we are forced to forget as a nation. Can you tell me a little bit more about the exhibition?
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Leon Goh: Hi Stephen, you recently curated OCTOPUS 9: I FORGET TO FORGET, which explored contemporary responses to Aboriginality and the ongoing cultural and racial problems that we face in Australia. I recently sat down with Stephen to discuss this exhibition. It also provided a space that allowed the artists to subvert established representations of the ‘other’, imbuing the exhibition with a critical edge. Exploring past and present experiences of what it means to be an Aboriginal person, this exhibition became a conduit for the artists to remember and re-document as a form of cathartic healing. Featuring the artists Tony Albert, Daniel Boyd, Andrea Fisher, Helen Johnson, Jonathon Jones, and Reko Rennie, the exhibition sought to actualise feelings of loss and trauma, while providing a conceptual space for the forging of new Aboriginal identities. Curated by Stephen Gilchrist, the Curator of Indigenous Art at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), it examined responses to, and reflections on, Aboriginality that are both historical and of this time. In this post-apology landscape, are there cultural, social and artistic spaces where reconciliation can occur? OCTOPUS 9: I FORGET TO FORGET is the latest in the annual Octopus exhibitions at Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne. Leon Goh in conversation with Stephen Gilchrist