It has been a week since I woke to a chaotic newsfeed and perplexed exchanges about the implications of Britain’s vote to leave the EU. In fact, I had already finished writing this exhibition review for Borders, Barriers, Walls, at the Monash University Museum of Art. However, in spite of the reverberations of the referendum, my text, as it were, seemed to lose its pertinence.
The debate over the United Kingdom’s membership in the EU elicited a racist discourse that pervades the legacy of imperial Britain. Symptomatic of a struggle to conceive of its place—as the experience of the empire recedes into the past—Britain’s vote exposed an assertion against pluralism, openness, and the eradication of borders. In this sense, this group exhibition, curated by Francis Parker, becomes especially salient, and speaks to the heart of the cultural chasms brought to bear in current affairs like the UK referendum.
The exhibition considers the embroiled tensions of a globalising wall that engenders ‘opportunity and insecurity, zones of contact and conflict, sites of cooperation and competition, places of ambivalent identities and aggressive assertions of difference’.1 Exploring the complexity and coexistence of these dichotomies, the artists included in the exhibition confront the shifting nature of territory and the multilayered role of borders and barriers amid the fluidity of globalisation.
The exhibition’s trajectory, however, also explores a much longer national narrative. In Australia, unresolved traumas of dispossession and the rewriting of borders have long histories and continue to impact Aboriginal Australians. Ricky Maynard, a descendant of Ben Lomond and Cape Portland peoples, records histories of displaced Indigenous communities. Producing Portrait of a Distant Land over a considerable time, Maynard carefully selected sites that