provisional states: this is my revolution,
Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia
The compunction to accrue and possess is one I will call “ur-colonisation”; the tendency to precondition territories, people animals and anything else in order to extend the borders and ubiquity of the colonizing identity; a self. Such a process involves expectations and constructions that obscure any alterity or singularity that would otherwise be evident to us in Others and in our habitat. This is not to position ur-colonisation as pejorative but rather to contemplate its provenance, purposes and complexities. Specifically, abstractly, in this installation the revolution might refer to the ubiquitous acquisition of things; collection and archiving to reinforce this colonising identity. The work alludes to these processes as political, as the ‘powers that be’ returning through revolutionary movements, repetitive text (a labour) and the deployment of narrative fragment, as “rolling” recorded (filmic) images. Other materials circle as implied spatial operations with folded, coiled, repeating or reciprocating actions.