Activating Truth

RMIT University's Contemporary Art and Social Transformation (CAST) research group and Next Wave present Activating Truth, a day-long free program on Friday 13 December held at Brunswick Mechanics Institute (BMI), involving artistic activations and conversations between First Peoples and settler artists and researchers focused on how creative practice can support truth-telling. 

Convened by CAST leader Dr Amy Spiers, Activating Truth at BMI brings together artists and researchers from across Naarm/Melbourne, other parts of so-called ‘Australia’, as well as Turtle Island/Canada, to share and deepen knowledge on ways that the truth about settler colonial violence can be activated responsibly and impactfully in community and localised contexts through creative practice. 

First Peoples' repeated calls for truth-telling and listening practices that recognise a fuller account of the Australian nation's past have intensified in the wake of the unsuccessful and damaging 2023 Voice to Parliament referendum process. Meanwhile, Victoria’s formal First Peoples-led truth-telling commission, Yoorrook Justice Commission, is currently underway taking submissions and holding hearings about the historic and ongoing injustices committed against First Peoples since the arrival of colonisers in Victoria. Emerging in this context, Activating Truth, will address timely questions concerning how First Peoples and settlers invested in the recognition and redress of colonial crimes employ creative practices and work together to ensure that the true history of Victoria and Australia is shared and heard in ways that activates lasting understanding, transformation, healing and justice.

As part of the Activating Truth program, attendees are also warmly invited to attend the opening of palawa artist Jody Haines' exhibition, In the Stillness of (Re)membering, on Thursday 12 December, 5.30-8pm at The Stables, Meat Market, North Melbourne.

Confirmed contributors to the program include (with more to follow):

Juundaal Strang-Yettica is a contemporary Indigenous multi-disciplinary emerging artist (Bundjalung and Kannakan). Her aim is to strengthen the non-Indigenous and Indigenous relationship, and negotiate meaningful, respectful space for the revitalisation of Indigenous culture and environmental knowledges, seeing this as crucial elements for responding to multi-species devastation in the Anthropocene. One of her primary practice goals is to facilitate socially engaged, collaborative projects that instigate, investigate and challenge multiple environmental and socio-political objectives and processes at once. 

Jody Haines (palawa) is a PhD candidate and staff member at RMIT University School of Art and a contemporary artist based in Naarm. Her unique practice blends social practice, photo-media (photography/video/film), and public art, creating large-scale public activations that include projections, paste-ups, and street-wide photographic installations.

Charmaine Papertalk Green (Wajarri, Badimaya) is a multi-media artist and esteemed poet who incorporates woodblock printing, painting, video, and installation work that challenges colonial narratives giving voice to the silenced histories of her people.

r e a (they/them) is from the Gamilaraay/Wailwan and Biripi peoples of NSW, they currently live and work in the Blue Mountains. r e a is an experimental interdisciplinary artist / curator / activist / researcher/ cultural educator and creative thinker. Their creative practice-led research extends over three decades, their art often focuses on unveiling the silence of the colonial archive.

Peter Morin is a grandson of Tahltan Ancestor Artists. Morin’s artistic offerings can be organized around four themes: articulating Land/Knowing, articulating Indigenous Grief/Loss, articulating Community Knowing, and understanding the Creative Agency/Power of the Indigenous body. The work takes place in galleries, in community, in collaboration, and on the land.

Leah Decter is a settler Canadian inter-media/performance artist and researcher based between Treaty One territory and K'jipuktuk, where Leah holds a Canada Research Chair in Creative Technology at NSCAD University. Her work, which focuses on critical and collaborative non-colonial/decolonial creative practice, has been exhibited, screened, presented and published internationally.

Amy Spiers is a settler artist, researcher and CAST leader based at RMIT School of Art examining non-Indigenous artists’ engagements with truth-telling the Australian settler nation's past through creative practice.

Marnie Badham is an uninvited guest from Turtle Island on Boon wurrung Country, Marnie’s work sits at the intersection of social practice, pedagogy, and participatory research exploring intercultural encounter through food-art-politics and creative cartographies. (RMIT School of Art)

Kelly Hussey-Smith is a settler educator and researcher based at RMIT University, School of Art. Kelly's work is focused on documentary photography and photography as a social practice.

George Criddle (British, Australian) is a conceptual and socially engaged artist whose colonial ancestors played a central role in frontier violence and nation-building in Jimbanu/Geraldton. Their work interrogates the privileges inherited by their family as a result of colonial dispossession, acknowledging the impact of their own lineage.

Please register to secure your place in the conversation at BMI. Places are limited. Full program and schedule will be shared in early December. Lunch will be provided and catered by PAWA.

The program is funded by RMIT University’s Strategic Impact Fund and Amy Spiers' Vice Chancellor Postdoctoral Fellowship Research Fund. Additional assistance is provided by partners, RMIT University School of Art’s Contemporary Art and Social Transformation (CAST) research group and Next Wave.

Image credit: Jody Haines, Blak Swan, from the series Flowing with the Future (Surviving Batman), 2024