Book Launch - Art and Memorialisation: Truth-Telling Through Creative Practice in Settler Colonial Australia

RMIT University's Contemporary Art and Social Transformation (CAST) research group in partnership with Next Wave invite you to the launch of Art and Memorialisation: Truth-Telling Through Creative Practice in Settler Colonial Australia (2024), a book published by Springer, and co-edited by Worimi creative, cultural practitioner and oral historian, Genevieve Grieves, and artist and researcher, Amy Spiers.

Convened by Amy Spiers and Genevieve Grieves, this special event will bring together many of the writers who contributed to the edited volume for discussion about the book's content and to give readings from their texts.

The launch will begin with a Welcome to Country and Smoking Ceremony from Wurundjeri at 3:30pm, followed by readings and discussion, and closing with drinks and light catering from PAWA from 6pm.

Date: Thursday 6 March 2025
Time: 3:30-7pm
Location: Brunswick Mechanics Institute, 270 Sydney Road, Brunswick Victoria

Art and Memorialisation: Truth-Telling Through Creative Practice in Settler Colonial Australia is a collection of essays, dialogues and creative texts that reflects on the profound effort undertaken by artists to contest settler denial and amnesia to disclose Australia's foundations in colonial violence and land theft. The book examines how First Nations creative and cultural practitioners have turned to the unique spaces of art and culture to remember and mourn the profound loss of life caused by British invasion and colonisation in the absence of official commemoration and public acknowledgement of the damage caused.

Significantly, the book focuses on a number of creative practitioners driving this powerful memory-work, containing contributions from some of the leading thinkers on truth-telling through creative practice, including Fiona Foley, Dianne Jones, Vicki Couzens, Julie Gough, r e a, Tony Birch, Paola Balla, Neika Lehman, Arlie Alizzi, Charmaine Papertalk Green, Kate Golding, Odette Kelada and Clare Land. An important contribution to scholarship on the public memorialisation of difficult histories, this edited collection foregrounds First Nations, female, queer, trans and gender diverse artists and scholars from the continent that is known as 'Australia'.

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-97-6289-7

This is a free event. Register to secure your spot as spaces are limited.

Convenor bios

Genevieve Grieves is a Worimi woman from Southeast Australia currently based in Garramilla (Darwin). She is an award-winning artist, curator and content creator committed to sharing First Peoples histories and cultures and interrogating colonising frameworks and practices. Her recent projects include The Violence of Denial exhibition (2017) as part of the Yirramboi Festival; Barangaroo Ngangamay (2016), a place-based Augmented Reality app that shares and celebrates the living cultures of Sydney Aboriginal women; and, she was the Lead Curator of the internationally celebrated permanent exhibition, First Peoples (2013), at the Melbourne Museum. She is a passionate advocator of decolonising and community-engaged practice and teaches these methodologies in university, institutional and community contexts. Her current role is co-founder and creative director of GARUWA, a First Nations storytelling agency.

Amy Spiers is an artist and researcher of settler descent, and currently a Senior Research Fellow based at RMIT School of Art, Naarm (Melbourne). She has presented art projects across Australia and internationally, including at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Monash University Museum of Art (Melbourne) and the 2015 Vienna Biennale. Amy has also published widely, including co-editing Let's Go Outside: Art in Public with Charlotte Day and Callum Morton for Monash University Museum of Art (Monash University Publishing 2022) and co-authoring the book, Art/Work: Social Enterprise, Young Creatives & the Forces of Marginalisation, with Grace McQuilten, Kim Humphery and Peter Kelly (Palgrave Pivot, 2022). More recently, she was awarded a 2024 Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) to examine non-Indigenous artists’ roles and responsibilities in truth-telling Australia’s colonial injustices and advancing First People’s sovereignty.

Image caption: Installation view at Arts House of The Violence of Denial  an exhibition curated by Genevieve Grieves in 2017, exhibiting left to right: Julie Gough, The Grounds for Surrender (2011); r e a, PolesApart (2009); Vicki Couzens, pang-ngooteeweeng-wanoong (we remember) (2017). Photograph: Bryony Jackson. Photo courtesy of Genevieve Grieves and Arts House.