Keynote Presenters
Dr Fiona Foley – Keynote Presenter
Monday 25th March: 11.00 – 12.00
Bio: Dr Fiona Foley
Qualifications/Appointments
2018 Doctor of Philosophy, Griffith University • 2011–17 Adjunct Professor, The University of Queensland • 2003–09 Adjunct Professor, Griffith University • 1987 Diploma of Education, Sydney Institute of Education, Sydney University • 1984– 86 Bachelor of Visual Arts, Sydney College of the Arts • 1982–83 Certificate of Arts, East Sydney Technical College
Dr Fiona Foley is a founding member of Boomalli Aboriginal Artist Co-operative. She exhibits regularly in Australia and internationally. Her recent solo exhibitions were held at Andrew Baker Art Dealer, Brisbane in 2017 and Niagara Galleries, Melbourne in 2012.
Dr Foley completed her PhD with Griffith University in 2017. The thesis topic examined Queensland’s legislation, The Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act, 1897. Her new work on this subject was received with significant interest.
In 2014 she was the recipient of an Australia Council Visual Arts Laureate Award. She is a regular keynote speaker at conferences and symposia all over the world. Most recently she convened Courting Blakness: Recalibrating Knowledge in the Sandstone University (2014) at the University of Queensland, where she was an Adjunct Professor (2011-2017).
Abstract:
Who are these strangers and where are they going?
Queensland’s relationship with Aboriginal sovereign nations is a precarious thin line of give and take. More often the status quo has involved Europeans taking. Once the colonial frontier was of a physical dimension. Now it has shifted to an intellectual occupation. There are still entrenched legacies from the possessive acts of colonialism which collectively we are yet to overcome.
Aboriginal academic Chelsea Bond argues that, “our [Aboriginal] presence [is] merely an accessory adding to the aesthetic of white knowing”. The academy and art world is full of “white knowing” when it comes to Aboriginal art but devoid of Indigenous Knowledge’s pertaining to Aboriginal frontier memorials.
The Aboriginal Memorial was a potent forerunner in the nation’s memorials made by Aboriginal individuals and societies for our war dead. This work inspired me to think at a deeper level about unearthing this country’s truths.
The research that I and my research assistant carried out between 2002 and 2004 unearthed 94 Aboriginal massacre sites on the public record in Queensland, and these became the focal point for the public artwork I created outside of Brisbane Magistrates Court titled Witnessing to Silence (2004). This work was a considered response to a statement made, ‘that Australia was settled peacefully’.
Dr Fiona Foley – Keynote Presenter
Monday 25th March: 11.00 – 12.00
Bio: Dr Fiona Foley
Qualifications/Appointments
2018 Doctor of Philosophy, Griffith University • 2011–17 Adjunct Professor, The University of Queensland • 2003–09 Adjunct Professor, Griffith University • 1987 Diploma of Education, Sydney Institute of Education, Sydney University • 1984– 86 Bachelor of Visual Arts, Sydney College of the Arts • 1982–83 Certificate of Arts, East Sydney Technical College
Dr Fiona Foley is a founding member of Boomalli Aboriginal Artist Co-operative. She exhibits regularly in Australia and internationally. Her recent solo exhibitions were held at Andrew Baker Art Dealer, Brisbane in 2017 and Niagara Galleries, Melbourne in 2012.
Dr Foley completed her PhD with Griffith University in 2017. The thesis topic examined Queensland’s legislation, The Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act, 1897. Her new work on this subject was received with significant interest.
In 2014 she was the recipient of an Australia Council Visual Arts Laureate Award. She is a regular keynote speaker at conferences and symposia all over the world. Most recently she convened Courting Blakness: Recalibrating Knowledge in the Sandstone University (2014) at the University of Queensland, where she was an Adjunct Professor (2011-2017).
Abstract:
Who are these strangers and where are they going?
Queensland’s relationship with Aboriginal sovereign nations is a precarious thin line of give and take. More often the status quo has involved Europeans taking. Once the colonial frontier was of a physical dimension. Now it has shifted to an intellectual occupation. There are still entrenched legacies from the possessive acts of colonialism which collectively we are yet to overcome.
Aboriginal academic Chelsea Bond argues that, “our [Aboriginal] presence [is] merely an accessory adding to the aesthetic of white knowing”. The academy and art world is full of “white knowing” when it comes to Aboriginal art but devoid of Indigenous Knowledge’s pertaining to Aboriginal frontier memorials.
The Aboriginal Memorial was a potent forerunner in the nation’s memorials made by Aboriginal individuals and societies for our war dead. This work inspired me to think at a deeper level about unearthing this country’s truths.
The research that I and my research assistant carried out between 2002 and 2004 unearthed 94 Aboriginal massacre sites on the public record in Queensland, and these became the focal point for the public artwork I created outside of Brisbane Magistrates Court titled Witnessing to Silence (2004). This work was a considered response to a statement made, ‘that Australia was settled peacefully’.
Patricia Adjei – Keynote Presenter
Patricia Adjei – Keynote Presenter
Tuesday 26th March: 9.00 – 10.00
Bio: Patricia Adjei
Patricia is a Wuthathi, Mabuiag Islander and Ghanaian woman from Sydney, Australia. Patricia has Bachelors of Arts and Law from UNSW. She currently works at the Australia Council for the Arts as the First Nations arts and culture director, a new role at the Australia Council for the Arts. She previously worked at the Copyright Agency l Viscopy as the Indigenous engagement manger.She served on the City of Sydney, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander advisory panel and has been a Board member of the Contemporary Pacific Arts Festival and the Moogahlin Performing Arts Board.In 2010, Patricia worked at the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) in Geneva as the 2010 Indigenous Intellectual Property Law Fellow. This position provided valuable insight into the traditional knowledge division’s work that is being done as the Secretariat for the international normative process on the draft international instruments on Traditional knowledge. Patricia has also worked as a lawyer at the Arts Law Centre of Australia and National Indigenous TV. She is also a published author, and has also written several articles and a chapter on Indigenous cultural intellectual property
Abstract:
Protection of Traditional cultural expressions and an update on the WIPO Intergovernmental Committee on Traditional Knowledge
A presentation around the protection of traditional cultural expressions at the international forum at the World Intellectual Property Organisation. The issues of exploitation of inauthentic Indigenous art products in Australia and overseas is a big issue that needs to be addressed. The Intergovernmental Committee on Intellectual Property and Genetic resources, traditional knowledge and folklore meets three times a year to discuss how international instruments can protect the Indigenous knowledge and cultural systems.
Kathy Jetnil Kijiner & Greg Dvorak – Keynote Presenter
Kathy Jetnil Kijiner & Greg Dvorak – Keynote Presenter
Wednesday 27th March: 9.00 – 10.00
Bio: Dr Greg Dvorak
Dr. Greg Dvorak (PhD, Australian National University) is a professor of International Cultural Studies at Waseda University in Tokyo, where he is based in both the Graduate School of International Culture and Communication Studies (GSICCS) and the School of International Liberal Studies (SILS). With a personal background of growing up, studying, and working between the Republic of the Marshall Islands, Japan, and the United States, his research and teaching focus on Japanese and American postcolonial histories in Oceania, with an emphasis on transoceanic intersections of art, gender, militarism, and gender in popular culture. His monograph, Coral and Concrete: Remembering Kwajalein Atoll between Japan, America, and the Marshall Islands was published by University of Hawai'i Press in November 2018 and is available through the QAGOMA bookstore. Dvorak is also the founding director of project35, a grassroots network that aims to raise awareness about the Pacific Islands region in Japan through art and scholarly exchange. As part of this initiative, he has been collaborating with local artists and researching art from Oceania, especially from Micronesia and areas that have been most impacted by Japanese and American colonialism. As an extension of this work, in 2017 he served as curatorial advisor to the director of the inaugural Honolulu Biennial, Fumio Nanjo (director of the Mori Art Museum). He is also in the process of helping to plan a large-scale exhibit of Oceanian contemporary art in Tokyo.
Bio: Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner
Kathy is a Marshall Islander poet, performance artist, educator. She received international acclaim through her poetry performance at the opening of the United Nations Climate Summit in New York in 2014. Her writing and performances have been featured by CNN, Democracy Now, the Huffington Post, NBC News, National Geographic, and more. In February 2017, the University of Arizona Press published her first collection of poetry, Iep Jāltok: Poems from a Marshallese Daughter.
Kathy also co-founded the youth environmentalist non-profit Jo-Jikum dedicated to empowering Marshallese youth to seek solutions to climate change and other environmental impacts threatening their home island.
Kathy has been selected as one of 13 Climate Warriors by Vogue in 2015 and the Impact Hero of the Year by Earth Company in 2016.
She received her Master’s in Pacific Island Studies from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.
Abstract:
Coral Reefs and Blasted Sands: A Conversation on Art As Ritual in the Marshall Islands
A conversation between writers/artists Greg Dvorak and Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, both with roots in the Marshall Islands. Greg’s background of growing up as an American on the US military base of Kwajalein atoll, one of the largest atolls in the Marshall Islands chain, and Kathy’s as an indigenous Marshallese raised in Hawai‘i, barred from living or visiting Kwajalein due to US military protocols against Marshallese, offers a disjuncture of place and un/settlement, a conflict that Greg and Kathy have regularly explored through conversations on art and history. Marshall Islands as a site of study also reintroduces Micronesia, a region that has, up to this year, had minimal presence in the Asia Pacific Triennial. Rather than signifying a vacuum of creativity, it instead points to the ways in which Micronesia has been largely silent in the curatorial work of Oceania, as well as demonstrating a need to break down what constitutes contemporary art versus handicrafts - the primary means of local Marshallese women’s economies, which now includes the traditional, intricately woven jaki-ed currently on display in APT9. The jaki-ed, as well as other forms of creation in the Marshall Islands, allows the curator and artist to understand how the intersections of colonialism and militarization, environment and gender, and queering and creativity, manifest in art as rituals. Rituals that are rooted in Marshallese traditions, such as Greg’s meditations on Kwajalein as a ritualized space, as well as new rituals, such as the rituals Kathy creates in her video poems or recent performance with APT9. Through this conversation, the hope is to share new ideas that have grown from memories rooted in the coral-scape of the Marshalls.