Thanks for attending!

Thank you for tuning in to the fourth webinar of our 2022 series, Critical Public Conversations: Undoing Australia on 3rd August. This webinar titled ‘Counter-monuments: Challenging distorted colonial histories through contemporary art and memorial practices’ featured proud Worimi woman Genevieve Grieves and artist Dr. Amy Spiers discussing the politics of memorialisation and counter-monuments in settler colonial contexts.

146 people joined over zoom, and 33 people viewed live or watched the recording on our Facebook page. 

Themes raised

• Counter monuments are a new critical mode of memorialisation that is designed either in opposition to traditional monument forms, or counter to a specific monument and the values it represents.
• Australian forms of counter-monument push what is typically understood by the term, First Nations historians are expanding modes of memorialisation into other art forms, such as film, music, and theatre.
• An example of a recent counter monument by Julia Gough, titled “Breathing Space” (2020), sees the statue of Crowther in Tasmania encased in a wooden crate. This work was intended to prevent continued traumatization of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island peoples at the hands of the 134-year-old statue.
• Genevieve describes the violence of denial and the decolonial practices of truth-telling through artwork and installations. She highlights the work of Vicki Couzens, Dianne Jones, and Julia Gough’s that not only opposes monological histories of colonisation, but that is also reviving and revitalizing cultural practices and language.

Some questions from the audience

• As a Palawa woman, how can people heal with the constant reminder of the trauma and destruction of our people with these statues?
• I work in the public sector, and we are undertaking a project to audit colonial art that exists in the department - art that represents a reality that is deeply traumatic and misrepresents the real history. The idea being discussed, however, is to retain the art and then add Indigenous works with a commentary that provides an Indigenous viewpoint. Like a counterpoint to the original work. Do you think that this is a good approach, given the fraught nature of complete removal or vandalization?
• What do you think we could do when we see highly inaccurate, offensive, or hurtful public art (short of vandalising it)?
• What do you think future truthful permanent memorials would look like?

Photo Credit: Counter-monuments image credit: Julie Gough, MISSING or DEAD (2019) 185 printed posters first installed in “The Queen’s Domain” forest, Hobart, June 2019, during Dark Mofo. Ink on rag photographique paper, each 34 x 21.2 cm, designed in collaboration with Margaret Woodward

Undoing Australia

Critical Public Conversations webinar series 2022