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Portray an extravagant political figure

Create a work depicting an extravagant political figure, alive or dead, using fantastic characters, settings and ideas

In 1888, despite the poor response to his only previous ballet Swan Lake (1875–76), Tchaikovsky accepted the commission to adapt the Charles Perrault fairy tale La Belle au Bois Dormant (Sleeping Beauty). He composed the music in an elaborately elegant style inspired by Loius XVI.

In 2019, emerging artists from the University of Melbourne were commissioned to depict an extravagant political figure, alive or dead, using fantastic characters, settings and ideas. The commissioned artist responses both celebrate and villianise today's political landscape, from the reaction of Jacinta Arden to the terrorist attack on Christchurch, to the environmental victims falling foul of political self-preservation.

Response

In a black room, a row of brown and beige jackets are hanging on coathangers suspended from the ceiling. They're swaying slightly as though in a light breeze. Each jacket has a fabric patch of the Aboriginal flag sewn in the centre of its back panel.

The jackets are all buttoned down the front, but some are ironed and some are creased, some are lined and some are not, some have pinstripes and some are plain brown, grey-brown or beige.

A single, beige-coloured jacket spins alone on a hanger apart from the others. It too bears the Aboriginal flag on its back as a fabric patch.

The jackets in the row begin to move more violently, rocking and spinning as though jostling for place.

A close-up of an Aboriginal-flag patch on a beige wool jacket with pinstripes. The red, black and yellow flag is framed by a thin border of black thread.

The jackets on hangers jostle even more roughly now, moving around and against each other as though they're inhabited by people.

The light in the room fades, and the jackets slowly vanish into darkness.

Edwina Green

Post-Colonial in Blak

Artist Statement

Post-Colonial in Blak speaks about the attempted erasure of Indigenous epistemologies and ultimately the political nature of first nations people within the ‘institution.’ This infrastructure was built on our sacred land, but was never made for us. Our bodies, presence and input within these spaces as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students and academics is an inherently political position, we carry this with us in everything that we do; we can place these clothes on our back, and cover our skin, but we will always be blak. We are our own political representatives in every form. There is no one who represents us better than us. We are your extravagant political figures, and we are our own voice, don’t write our narrative - Listen to us when we speak.

Working across installation, film/video, painting, photography and textiles, Edwina’s work, informed by her Aboriginal heritage as a Trawlwoolway woman, creates narratives that engage, provoke, and question the viewers place within society and their interaction with the post-colonial paradigm and it’s affects on people and place.

This work comprises 9 colonial jackets with the blak flag

Artist

Edwina Green, Bachelor of Fine Arts (Visual Art), graduating 2019

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Other Responses

Kirsten Hoffman

Napoleon

Oliver Cox

For Jacinda Part I: Ardern, Part II: You are us, Part III: Up

Shaun Wykes

The Murray Darling Cod

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