Home Ground

The work of the four artists in this exhibition relates to each one’s intimate knowledge of place, specifically the area in which they were born and continue to live in or nearby. Though their experience of home covers four very different parts of the world – from Palestine’s Galilee region to central Australia’s Gibson Desert, from the urban chaos of Bogotá to the rural austerity of Breadalbane – the artists are linked by an employment of home in their art as an actual and metaphorical starting point from which to reflect on the broader human experience.

Palestinian artist Ahlam Shibli and Colombian Juan Manuel Echavarría undertake their practice at the coalface of political oppression and violence, Shibli in occupied Palestine, Echavarría in war ravaged Colombia. These two artists’ work is photo-based, a medium that facilitates maximum spontaneity in the most intimate of settings. They present an insider’s view of the home ground, one that is inextricably bound to each artist’s own history and sense of identity. Seen for the first time in Australia, Shibli’s series of photographs, Unrecognised, was included in last year’s Istanbul Biennale, and Echavarría’s two video works featured in the 2005 Venice Biennale.

The two Australian artists here – one black, one white – paint a land to which both their lives are closely tied. We see social beliefs and stories about the land in Napangati’s work and monuments to specific people having passed through a place in Jenny Bell’s graves. In very different ways, both evoke social histories and cultural traditions that echo across the contemporary experience. Napangati was one of the artists included in Primavera 2005 (curated by Felicity Fenner) at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art.

Within diverse geographical contexts, each of the artists in Home Ground trace through personal stories the links between people and place. Napangati does this by making marks relating to rituals undertaken in the land, Bell by depicting structures and objects with symbolic resonance beyond the place and time in which they were created. Shibli finds a visual parallel between the harsh geographic and political climates in which her people tenaciously create a stable home life on their traditional lands, while Echavarría introduces and gives voice to the forgotten victims of trauma and violence.