Death of a Memorial: Critical Forum
Saturday 25 October | UTS Green Theatre

Curated by Nathan mudyi Sentance, Death of a Memorial: Critical Forum brings together leading First Nations poets, curators, artists, and academics for a day of conversations, poetry, and making that explore truth, memory, and resistance.

Through panels, performances, and acts of creation, the forum asks how we remember, commemorate, and resist, and how art can challenge what W.E.H. Stanner called the “cult of forgetfulness” and “the Great Australian Silence.”

The day begins at 12:30pm with Memory as Living Practice: Weaving with Jodie Dowd. Noongar weaver Jodie Dowd invites participants to create a bracelet or basket woven throughout the afternoon, each stitch an act of remembering that carries the day’s conversations forward.

At 1:00pm, Aunty Rhonda Dixon Grovenor delivers a Welcome to Country, grounding the program in respect and connection to place.

At 1:25pm, Who Owns the Past: Creating Against Symbolic Annihilation brings together Tammi Gissell, Joel Sherwood Spring, and Damien Webb to discuss how artists and academics engage with and challenge colonial collections, repatriating love and presence to the Ancestors silenced in the archive.

At 2:15pm, From Monuments to Memes: How Colonial Misinformation Spreads features Coby Edgar, Phoebe McIlwraith, and Tyson Frigo in conversation about how ignorance and misinformation are maintained, from statues and archives to media narratives and AI slop, and how artists confront the myths that obscure truth.

An afternoon tea at 3:15pm offers free snacks and coffee, providing a moment for rest and informal exchange.

At 4:00pm, the forum culminates in an In Conversation with Brook Garru Andrew and Ruby Langton-Batty. In the space between bouncing and mourning, between laughter and tears, Indigenous artists carve out territories of truth. Together, they discuss Death of a Memorial and the role of artistic resistance in confronting silence, loss, and colonial forgetting.

Throughout the day, poets Kaitlen Wellington, Jaala Hallet, and Nathan mudyi Sentance offer Poetic Interventions, moments of reflection and deep listening that bring language to memory, commemoration, and resistance.

Join us for a day of truth-telling, weaving, poetry, and dialogue as we collectively reimagine how memory is held, shared, and transformed.

Death of a Memorial: Critical Forum is supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund and hosted at UTS with support from the Centre for Social Justice & Inclusion.

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