About The Exhibition
We, Us, Them – Preview is a spotlight on the three Australian artists Raphaela Rosella, Anu Kumar and Cate Consandine, and is a preview of We, Us, Them which opens in February/March of 2022 with two major exhibitions in both Belfast and Melbourne.
We, Us, Them is supported by the UK/Australia Season and is a collaboration between the British Council and the Australian Government’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and the Arts Council for Northern Ireland, and will consider community, race and language, and chart how communities throughout the world see and define themselves.
We, Us, Them represents the first outcome of a collaborative relationship between Belfast Exposed (Belfast, UK) and Centre for Contemporary Photography (Melbourne, AUS), culminating with the launch of the exhibition in 2022.
Attempts to capture or encapsulate communities and groups are often predicated upon power structures that essentialise and flatten - the artists featured in We, Us, Them approach this representation from a rich variety of viewpoints, charting the multiple expressions of group and community identity, whilst also exploring the basis of collaboration. What does collaboration mean for dis-empowered groups? What can be achieved in amplifying rarely heard voices in contemporary photography? What do the foundational concepts within contemporary practice (such as the archive, documentation and collaboration) mean for the creation of community?
Recognising Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as the sovereign people and the Irish Traveller community as First Nation ethnic minorities, We, Us, Them has been developed from an ambition to reflect self-determination and control, platforming and celebrating the achievements of diverse communities: ownership of image and archive, the power of collaboration and collective, and connecting and promoting indigenous languages and cultures and acknowledging the strength and resilience of communities surviving and adapting to their changing environments.
The Artists
Raphaela Rosella Anu Kumar Cate Consandine Julie RrapRaphaela Rosella
In 2022, alongside Dayannah Baker Barlow, Rowrow Duncan, Tricia Whitton and family, Rosella will present HOMEtruths - a three-channel video work that seeks to amplify feelings of intimacy, frustration, kinship, and connectedness that circulate between imprisoned people and their loved ones through interactions with the carceral state. As part of their long-form project 'You'll Know It When You Feel It', Rosella and her co-creators seek to examine how co-created archives can resist bureaucratic representations of women whose lives intersect with the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC).
Anu Kumar
Anu will present the first exhibition drawn out of her personal archive of photography documenting her experience as an Australian of Indian descent. A reflection on the understanding of place, and the position of diasporic communities, Kumar’s intensely personal documentative photography acts as a lyrical celebration of her extended family, and the importance of place and home.
Cate Consandine
Cate's hybrid sculpture and video work The Departure explores the binary conditions of restraint and release, aggression and refuge, contraction and openness. Informed by the physicality of a community of senior female dancers, and acting as an archive of dance form and function, the work celebrates a repository of movement stored - a commemoration of a community of energy, kinetics and the strength of age.
Julie Rrap
Julie will present her key recent body of work Blow Back, outside of New South Wales for the first time. These portraits represent a collective performance act that uses breath as an action that is both gentle yet provocative. Operating as a localised form of expression for the community of women artists in Sydney that make up the subjects of the work, the performers open mouths mock the endless images of women posed in this way to suggest their receptivity; like a vessel waiting to be filled.
Events
Thursday 25th November | 6:00pm - 9:00pm | Belfast Exposed
FreePress
Acknowledgements
'We, Us, Them’ is generously sponsored by Arts Council of Northern Ireland and Belfast City Council, and supported by the UK/Australia Season Patrons Board, the British Council, and the Australian Government as part of the UK/Australia Season.