Performing Aboriginality
Encountering Culture: A Dialogue
Out of Place
Atonement
Lost in Translation
Displaced Objects
Wind in Utopia
Habitat: A Question of Place

Performing Aboriginality (2009 - current)

My artistic practice and research has grown out of an on-going cycle of annual returning to Alice Springs/Central Australia which began in 1993 (December-March), fortuitously enabled by winning The Alice Prize in 1991 (Judge: Jenepher Duncan).

In time, I developed a close relationship to specific Aboriginal families living in, and around, the township of Alice Springs, a social network made possible through my initial relationship to Erica Franey. To date, two large bodies of photographic work, Out of Place (2001-02) and Encountering Culture: A Dialogue (2006) have been the result of those personal and professional relationships. Performing Aboriginality will be the third component of what, I consider, to be a conceptual trilogy on the everyday “lived” life of Alice Springs.

My current (on-going) project is based on the “secret commerce of kinship”, an economy of inter-relatedness and ethical participation that involves co-dependency, reciprocal obligation, attentiveness, and affective behaviour. This philosophy not only encompasses the immediate production of work (and one’s relations to the participants), but also informs future responsibilities and obligations, and appropriate frames of reception. I have been working amongst a particular group of Aboriginal families since 1999. My primary relationship is to Erica Franey, an Arrernte/Luritja speaker, and her family and kin.



Image Left:
Chris Barry
Steve Gumerungi Hodder Watt
Encountering Culture: A Dialogue (2006)
Digital photographic print
112.0cm x 106.5cm

Publications

Togart Award 2010
Catalogue

Togart Award 2009
Catalogue

The Artist as Ethnographer (Chris Barry)

 

Image Below:
Chris Barry
Jacinta Nampijinpa Castle, James Braedon & Steve Gumerungi Hodder Watt
Performing Aboriginality Triptych (2009)
Digital photographi print
80.0cm x 80.0cm
each print

The Artist as Ethnographer

My research/projects draw together three main areas of inquiry: a reflexive ethnographic practice; an Aboriginal pedagogy; and the practice of art. As an artist, these are the methodologies one needs to step into an “unknowable” culture and produce a body of work out of the “experience”. However, more importantly, the history of ethnographic practices, and, in particular, the post 1980s re-evaluation of the discipline, is central to this type of artistic/scholarly project. By positioning the “artist as ethnographer”, I am able to draw together the key tenets of inter-cultural engagement and the political and ethical dilemmas of cultural production, as well as my own subjectivity in this collaborative process. This analysis is then translated into local terms, the everyday lived life of Alice Springs - articulated through an Aboriginal “enunciation” - and a history of sustained relations amongst a specific group of Aboriginal families, generously initiated by Erica Franey, a relationship that continues into the present. These projects, then, emerge from a vast network of relations, and the contingencies and sociality of a specific location.

My means of translating the experience of “being there” into an appropriate representational form is through a “politics of the performative”, a re-enactment and re-presentation of subject identities within our culturally imbricated (and agonistic) relations: the dramaturgy of inter-cultural encounter. Performance, then, mediates the politics of identity and enables an assertive Aboriginal presencing to occur, where the participants themselves test colonial models of representation, and, in particular, the ethnographic/racial gaze. Performance, then, from the participants’ perspective, is one is which they take control of the representation and their subject-identities, and a conceptual re-enactment of culture is presented as a self-conscious, constructed, and staged public document. The challenge, of course, is to dismantle preconceived assumptions, conventions, and expectations that inform representation and the production of cultural identities.
© Chris Barry

Links

Interventions @ The Australian Anthropological Society Annual Conference 2009

The production of art as an area of social action

National Library of Australia—Catalogue: Interventions: Experiments between Art and Ethnography

The South Project (Melbourne 2010: How does a network…?)

Image Above:
Chris Barry
Athena Magoufakis, Julie Woodford,
Sasha AhChee, Rosie Parsons, Lisa Kunoth
& Ricki-Lee Tilmouth
Performing Aboriginality (a), 2010
Digital photographic print
70.0cm x 210.0cm

Image Below:
Chris Barry
Lawrence Dickson and Passer-by Performing Aboriginality (b), 2010
Digital photographic print
70.0cm x 210.0cm

Links

Leonhardi Kulturprojekte (Performing Aboriginality)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images Left:
Performing Aboriginality
Installation View
Leonhardi Kulturprojekte, Karben/Frankfurt, June 2009
Photographs: Nathalie Grenzhaeuser

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