This Mess We're In: Pat Hoffie and Vernon Ah Kee in conversation

Join us for this special in-conversation event with exhibiting artist Pat Hoffie and QUT Art Collection artist Vernon Ah Kee as they discuss the provocation 'Thinking about reality and representation in an 'Age of Terror'. 

'This Mess We’re In' explores the chaos and catastrophes that have become white noise in our everyday lives. Through a visual anthology of failures, propositions and imagined futures, Brisbane-based artist Pat Hoffie presents us with a series of mise en scènes where the borderlines between the factual and the fantastic disintegrate.

Vernon Ah Kee is a member of the Kuku Yalandji, Waanji, Yidinji and Gugu Yimithirr peoples, his conceptual text pieces, videos, photographs and drawings form a critique of Australian culture from the perspective of the Aboriginal experience of contemporary life. Ah Kee’s works respond to the history of the romantic and exoticised portraiture of ‘primitives’, and effectively reposition the Aboriginal in Australia from an ‘othered thing’, anchored in museum and scientific records to a contemporary people inhabiting real and current spaces and time.

Image: Pat HOFFIE 'Flak Jacket (detail)' 2020, archival inkjet print on cotton rag. Courtesy of the artist.