Vernon Ah Kee
Not an Animal or a Plant
showing at National Art School, Sydney during the Sydney Festival
He comments: that in this fiftieth year since the 1967 referendum which decided to include Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island people in the census count:
"We
are going backwards as a country, especially in the last 15 years with
Palm Island, the Cronulla riots, the re-election of Pauline Hanson, the
intervention policies in northern communities, and the latest
developments with asylum seeker policies. Anyone can see we are moving
backwards. Quite a bit. Australia is no shining star in the human rights
arena."
Andrew Frost in Guardian review: notes that Ah Kee was not counted as a human when he was born in 1967; and wonders if one work ( Born in this skin) distances the viewer from the racism of the artworld, and the viewers' own racism, by siting it in the ready-made doors taken from a toilet block on Cockatoo Island - far away.
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