'holiday camp' screenings + mike parr
Having spent more time lately than I would care to admit whingeing about the insularity of the local arts scene, it was with enthusiasm and some portent that I received word of the Borderpanic program of events in Sydney. This ambitiously incorporated an exhibition, film screening, seminar, symposium and tactical media lab. The exhibition, at The Performance Space, mobilised a large body of work and project documentation by local and international artists/activists taking their departure from the manifold injustices of refugee policy to broadly conceive a world without borders. Amidst the racket some works held their own, notably Peter Lyssiotis' photomontage narrative The Great Wall of Australia (made with awesome prescience in 1983), which dryly asserts and historicises the construction of a suburban-style brick wall across a south-eastern portion of the country. Illustrated with generic magazine imagery it cleverly and economically mined the menace resident in urban peripheries. Two isolated panels from Gordon Hookey's Ruddock's Wheel stood out for their directness and pointed humour, with a warmongering Howard characterised as Mr Sheen ('making the nation white, tight and right') overlaid with a Seuss-like interpretation of immigration policy: 'We welcome the pale, pinky, white skin. All you's white, racist, sethefrikins, come in'. Most pressing were the works and comments included by artists currently imprisoned in Villawood detention centre, such as those of father and son Jassim and Humam AI Abaddy: an imagined landscape painted onto the back of a takeaway container lid, Jesus behind fencing and wire, and a tender self-portrait by sixteen year old Humam, all spoke clearly and unassumingly of a starkly different reality and the role of creativity in such a place.
In other respects the exhibition brought