Semester:
Offered:
Prof. Jennifer Biddle
T 9:00 AM - 11:45 AM
The course is an introduction to Australian First Nations Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island art and new media. The focus is arts of the Central and Western Desert. The course maps sites of language and cultural (re)production, forms of materiality and conditions of colonialism in order to develop appreciation of relationships between art, life and survival. Against neo-liberal and market driven tendencies to commodify Aboriginal culture, the course considers not only contexts in which art is made but what art makes and does as practice, agent and mobilising force. Major themes include art and Native Title; inalienability; the remote art economy; occupation, extraction and precarity; digital mediations and the hyperreal; transnational exhibition; Indigenous curation. Students will engage with a rich and interdisciplinary scholarship, reading with and against the canon, from classical ethnography and linguistics to more recent phenomenological, feminist, decolonial and Indigenous studies in order to develop critical and conceptual frameworks and visual literacies through applied analysis. What do works of Australian First Nations art do and ask, from whose perspective, for what purpose? What kinds of ways of seeing – forms of engagement - are required? What are appropriate?
Course Notes:
In addition to weekly (day) class meetings, the course will feature a series of three to four (TBC) evening-based global time-zone screenings and guest lectures from First Nations Australian artists, curators and academics across a range of course thematic.