A panel conversation about how contemporary artists engage with photography’s troubled relationship to land, place and Country.
Andreas Feininger, Utah Copper: Bingham Mine, 1942.
In Australia, the United States, and around the world, land has been subjected to a series of violent processes – colonial expropriation, division by borders, and the extraction of its resources.
Since its invention in the 19th century, photography has provided an important visual record of these processes but is also a product of this history. From its early dependence on the mining and global circulation of minerals like copper and silver, to its role in the resource-hungry spread of digital images today, one could say that the act of photography is constantly taking place.
Featuring Peta Clancy, Brett Neilson, Simryn Gill and Amanda Williams, this panel will consider how contemporary Australian artists have responded to this history, how they engage with photography’s troubled relationship to land, place and Country, and how they use photographic technologies and practices to envision different relationships between people and places.
Co-presented with the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, in association with the exhibtion Zoe Leonard: Al río / To the River.
People
Peta Clancy
Peta Clancy is a descendant of the Yorta Yorta/Bangerang people from South-eastern Australia. She lives and works on Wurundjeri Country in Naarm.
Clancy is an artist and researcher in the Wominjeka Djeembana Indigenous practice-based research Lab at MADA, Monash University. In 2023 Clancy was awarded a Fellowship from the Visual Arts and Craft Board of the Australia Council for the Arts. Her photographic installation Confluence was commissioned by the National Gallery of Victoria for the exhibition Slippery Images curated by Maggie Finch for Melbourne Now 2023.
Clancy was awarded the 2018 Fostering Koorie Art and Culture and Koorie Heritage Trust Residency Grant to research and develop the exhibition project Undercurrent in 2019. Created in collaboration with Dja Dja Wurrung Traditional Custodians Mick Bourke and Amos Atkinson, Undercurrent explored an underwater massacre site on Dja Dja Wurrung Country and was first exhibited in 2019 at the Koorie Heritage Trust in Melbourne. Clancy’s artwork has been exhibited widely at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts; National Centre for Contemporary Arts, Kaliningrad Branch, Russia; Southeast Museum of Photography, US; Bendigo Art Gallery; and the Art Gallery New South Wales. Her work is represented in the collections at the National Gallery of Victoria; Bendigo Art Gallery; Ballarat Art Gallery; RMIT University; Deakin University; Artbank and Parliament House.
Clancy is represented by Dominik Mersch Gallery.
Amanda Williams
Amanda Williams lives and works on Gadigal Country, Sydney.
Amanda Williams is a visual artist working with photochemical processes to examine connections between the history of photography and physical environments. Williams’ work is held in several national collections including the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney and the Murray Art Museum Albury, New South Wales. Her work has been exhibited widely across Australia and the UK, including in: Return to nature, Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne (2022); The Truth, PHOTO 2021 International Festival of Photography, Melbourne (2021); Whose Land Is It?, Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool, UK (2021); and Archie Plus, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2020). In 2018, Williams was awarded the National Photography Prize, Murray Art Museum, Albury, and in 2020 was a finalist in the William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize, Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne. In 2021, Williams was awarded the Creative Industries Residency at the Powerhouse Museum, offering access to the museum’s archive and historic camera collection to further her research into the historiography and materiality of photography.
Simryn Gill
Simryn Gill is an artist whose work spans photography, drawing, printing, object making and writing. Gill articulates the poetics of history, power and identity that striate the places and environments between which she lives and moves. With Tom Melick she runs Stolon Press, a small publisher of books and pamphlets in Sydney. In 2023 Gill's work was shown at MCA, Sydney; Barbican, London; Singapore Art Museum; Linnaen Society, London. Gill has participated in numerous international exhibitions, including the Singapore Biennale (2006), documenta (2007, 2012), Istanbul Biennial (2011, 2022), Venice Biennale (2013) and Dhaka Art Summit (2018), Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale (2024).
Brett Neilson
Brett Neilson is Professor and Deputy Director at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University.
With Sandro Mezzadra, he is author of Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor (Duke University Press, 2013), The Politics of Operations: Excavating Contemporary Capitalism (Duke University Press, 2019) and The Rest and the West: Capital and Power in a Multipolar World (Verso, 2024). Recently, Neilson published a catalogue essay entitled Extractive Operations: Copper and the Photographic Image for the Mining Photography exhibition held at the Museum für Kunst & Gewerbe Hamburg.
