Curator: Clare Williamson
On first seeing the title for this exhibition – Who Do You Take Me For? – the image that leapt to mind was far from the range of photo based works actually presented. Instead, I thought of a piece of television merchandising –that Matt Groening cartoon character T·shirt, the one with the caption "I'm Bart Simpson, who the hell are you? ". While at first glance these two queries about identity may appear to be quite similar, it quickly becomes clear that they actually suggest the existence of quite different power relationships. While the fictional interlocutor, "Bart Simpson ", speaks confidently of sell-identity, aggressively challenging his respondents to identify themselves, the question, "who do you take me for?" – as a call for extra-subjective definition – seems to suggest uncertainty on the part of the speaker; not 'this is who I am, who are you?", but "who do you take me for?" ("I'm uncertain of my identity, how do you define me?"). Read this way, the title of the exhibition seems to cut against the positive politics of self-definition that are a dominant concern of many of the works.
Significantly, this process of interrogation and assertion has the potential to place the viewer in an unstable position in relation to many of the works, one which requires some rethinking of the simple "self/other" binary system – around which this exhibition is necessarily constructed. As curator, Clare Williamson, states in her catalogue essay, this "is an exploration of photo-based work by British and Australian practitioners whose work deals with issues of 'otherness' as perceived by the dominant culture in which they live". Thus, the exhibition both sets out to critique simple