Diminished culture until we whitefellas decolonise ourselves
DRHA 2022 Exhibition (Digital Research in the Humanities and Arts Conference).
Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston School of Art, Kingston University London, 4-10 September 2022.
Curated by Dr Bill Balaskas.
Diminished culture until we whitefellas decolonise ourselves, is a new work within a series in development as part of Kimberley’s forthcoming international art-practice-as-research PhD titled, A Proposition towards A Praxis of Treaty with International Country | Australian National University Canberra & Kingston School of Art London (2019-2024).
“Developed during an extended self-directed residency in the UK in 2022, the work is an enquiry into the contemporaneity of Originary (pre-historic) petroglyphs in the UK/Europe, reconsidered through the lens of long-term transcultural collaborative contemporary art praxis with First Nations artists and petroglyphs, in lutruwita / Tasmania.
Building on 30 years of decolonial art and curatorial praxis in Australia, the project seeks to decolonise the contemporaneity of neolithic Land Art (petroglyphs) in the UK/Europe, recognising anew what is arguably part of the worlds most significant Originary transcultural art praxis.
As a descendent of a First Fleet convict from the UK, Edward Kimberley, who arrived on the continent of Australia in 1788 and subsequently became a free settler to lutruwita /Tasmania in 1808, the project reflects on a profound personal sense of loss of deeptime cultural knowledge within my cultural Originary in the UK and Europe.
Revisiting the virtually abandoned artistic source code of Originary petroglyphs in the UK / Europe is a step towards decolonising myself.”
Jonathan Kimberley.
DRHA 2022 Exhibition (Digital Research in the Humanities and Arts Conference).
Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston School of Art, Kingston University London, 4-10 September 2022.
https://www.drha.uk/2022/exhibition
https://www.stanleypickergallery.org/events/main-events/drha-2022/
The DRHA 2022 exhibition interrogates the parallel emergencies that define our post-pandemic world, and the protagonist role that digital technologies and science play within it. Inspired by the title of this year’s conference, “Digital Sustainability: From Resilience to Transformation”, the artworks featured in the exhibition consider existing challenges while, also, inviting us to speculate on what might come next. Using a variety of digital and analogue media, the artists of DRHA 2022 explore issues and ideas that vividly reflect this time of profound change for humanity and our planet: climate crisis; post-digital materiality; the human body within and beyond virtual milieus; non-human worlds; social media narratives and narratologies; post-apocalyptic aesthetics; data visualisation and biases; AI and corporate culture; decolonisation and identity. Collectively, the artworks included in the exhibition suggest that although new models of creating and co-existing are rapidly emerging, moving from resilience to transformation may only be achieved through developing a holistic view of our relationship with digital technologies – namely, through understanding both their dormant potentialities and their multiple black boxes.
Curated by Dr Bill Balaskas, Director of Research, Business and Innovation, School of Arts, Kingston University, London.
