Humming a New Diaspora
Curated by Dunja Rmandic
Sofi Basseghi, Katya Grokhovsky, Mariam Janahi, Kiera Brew Kurec and Nicki Wynnychuk
6 November – 22 November 2008
Gallery One
Supported by the City of Melbourne.
This exhibition has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
On a crowded tram occasionally someone would be humming or softly singing an unfamiliar but captivating tune. Often two or more people would be engaged in a loud conversation across the aisle. And more often than not these musical interruptions and disruptive conversations would not be conducted in the default international language, English.
In the context of diasporic gestures, humming – as a subliminal presence and a strategy for disruption – goes beyond a metaphor and becomes a moment of spatial and locational presence that itself incites a moment of reflection for the observer. It is the potency and significance of these diasporic gestures – their location within the contemporary social, cultural and political context, as opposed to demarcations of identity within migrant communities – that this exhibition explores.
While it is paramount in any context to ask and reinstate questions about negotiation of identity in the contemporary social and political climate (as well as in contemporary art practice), so too is it paramount to scrutinise the significance of the very questions asked. Humming a New Diaspora brings together a group of artists who reinscribe notions of identity within our multicultural society by scrutinising the salient questions.
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