Displaced Objects (1986/1996)

Exiles and immigrants are very often ‘haunted by some sense of loss’ writes Salman Rushdie in Imaginary Homelands, ‘some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt’. Yet, if we do look back’, he warns, ‘we must also do so in the knowledge – which gives rise to profound uncertainties – that our physical alienation… inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; that we will, in short, create fictions… imaginary homelands’ (Rushdie 1992:10).

Displaced Objects is a series of 14 photographic works originally produced in 1986 as Cibachrome prints or direct positive colour photographs (50.0cm x 50.0cm). In 1996, these same works were enlarged and reprinted as Type C photographic prints (127.0cm x 127.0cm) as part of a survey exhibition entitled, Wind in Utopia, staged at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) in Melbourne.

Publications

Displaced Objects, or
Sittings for a Family
Portrait (Chris Barry)

Contemporary Australian Collage and its Origins (Freda Freiberg)

Links

National Gallery of Victoria (NGV Collection)

Griffith University Art Collection (Rhapsody in Green and Yellow)

Griffith University Art Collection (Epitaph)

Image left:
Chris Barry
Untitled (Self Portrait)
Displaced Objects 1986/96
Direct positive colour photograph/
Type C photographic print
50.0cm x 50.0cm/127.0cm x 127.0cm
Collection: Australian National Gallery &
National Gallery of Victoria

Image above:
Chris Barry
Cargo
Displaced Objects 1986/96
Direct positive colour photograph/
Type C photographic print
50.0cm x 50.0cm/127.0cm x 127.0cm

Writers and historians alike have elaborated on the impossibility for exiles and immigrants to reclaim their homeland place – that ambiguous territory left behind or extinguished by physical removal and alienation. Instead, they carry with them in their wanderings – as they traverse towns, countries, and hemispheres – freeze frames of constructed memory: imaginary homelands inhabited by their fearing and desiring.

The physical departure from one’s home involves an ontological and psychological severance that is irredeemable (Berger 1984:67). The source and locus of life is cut. Edward Said describes this as ‘the unhealable rift between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home…’ (Said 1990:357)

For the immigrant or exile, photography supplements oral histories, personal narratives, and places of belonging. The circulation of photographs links and binds familial relationships across space and time. It works towards the construction of place and the articulation of that belonging. Photographs perform imaginative returnings to those places, communities, and families left behind or extinguished – imaginary homelands drawn into present day itineraries and lives. Photography archives genealogies and familial links and participates in the circuits of power and desire. The photograph acts as both icon and narrative.

 

Image above:
Chris Barry
Half Life
Displaced Objects 1986/96
Direct positive colour photograph/
Type C photographic print
50.0cm x 50.0cm/127.0cm x 127.0cm
Collection: State Library of Victoria

 

Image above:
Chris Barry
Rhapsody in Green and Yellow
Displaced Objects 1986/96
Direct positive colour photograph/
Type C photographic print
50.0cm x 50.0cm/127.0cm x 127.0cm
Collection: Griffith University Art Collection

 

Image above:
Chris Barry
Epitaph
Displaced Objects 1986/96
Direct positive colour photograph/
Type C photographic print
50.0cm x 50.0cm/127.0cm x 127.0cm
Collection: National Gallery of Victoria &
Griffith University Collection

 

Image above:
Chris Barry
Packaged Deal
Displaced Objects 1986/96
Direct positive colour photograph/
Type C photographic print
50.0cm x 50.0cm/127.0cm x 127.0cm
Collection: Australian National Gallery

 

Image above:
Chris Barry
Requiem
Displaced Objects 1986/96
Direct positive colour photograph/
Type C photographic print
50.0cm x 50.0cm/127.0cm x 127.0cm
Collection: City of Port Phillip

Image above:
Chris Barry
Picture/Post
Displaced Objects 1986/96
Direct positive colour photograph/
Type C photographic print
50.0cm x 50.0cm/127.0cm x 127.0cm

Image above:
Chris Barry
Anzacs
Displaced Objects 1986/96
Direct positive colour photograph/
Type C photographic print
50.0cm x 50.0cm/127.0cm x 127.0cm

Image above:
Chris Barry
Mother
Displaced Objects 1986/96
Direct positive colour photograph/
Type C photographic print
50.0cm x 50.0cm/127.0cm x 127.0cm
Collection: State Library of Victoria

Image above:
Chris Barry
Suburban Bather
Displaced Objects 1986/96
Direct positive colour photograph/
Type C photographic print
50.0cm x 50.0cm/127.0cm x 127.0cm

Image above:
Chris Barry
Untitled (Synonymous)
Displaced Objects 1986/96
Direct positive colour photograph/
Type C photographic print
50.0cm x 50.0cm/127.0cm x 127.0cm
Collection: State Library of Victoria &
National Gallery of Victoria

Image above:
Chris Barry
Untitled (Patricia Marczak)
Displaced Objects 1986/96
Direct positive colour photograph/
Type C photographic print
50.0cm x 50.0cm/127.0cm x 127.0cm
Collection: Australian National Gallery,
Horsham Regional Art Gallery &
City of Melbourne

Image above:
Chris Barry
Untitled (Self Portrait)
Displaced Objects 1986/96
Direct positive colour photograph/
Type C photographic print
50.0cm x 50.0cm/127.0cm x 127.0cm
Collection: Australian National Gallery &
National Gallery of Victoria

Image above:
Chris Barry
Postscript
Displaced Objects 1986/96
Direct positive colour photograph/
Type C photographic print
50.0cm x 50.0cm/127.0cm x 127.0cm