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Hello and welcome to the Monday Breakfast show for Monday the 5th of May 2025. On today's show:Headlines:Liberal Party losing the 2025 federal election, Peter Dutton losing seat in DicksonIsrael looking to expand military presence in Gaza with thousands of army reservists.UK clubs sign open letter against the country's Football Association implementing ban of trans people being a part of teams following Supreme Court ruling. // Second part of the speeches from the rally supporting harm reduction and evidence-based healthcare. Standing against stigma, scapegoating, and the criminalisation of people who use drugs. Continuing on from the speeches we aired in last weeks episode.This rally was held last Sunday, on the 27th of April countering a network of North Richmond business owners, property developers, and local career politicians holding a rally in North Richmond.which was promoting a “demand for action” in relation to “safety concerns” about people who use drugs. Part of an ongoing campaign targeting North Richmond's medically supervised drug consumption space and the demonising of people who use this service. We hear a segment from a recent episode of Indigenous Rights Radio's Cultural Survival podcast featuring Indigenous activist Simon Witbooi (Nama). Simon discusses historical and contemporary racial discrimination and the place of the Khoi and San people in South Africa in the context of the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. The International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination is observed annually on March 21st in commemoration of the Sharpeville Massacre, where police killed 69 people demonstrating against racist apartheid “pass laws” in apartheid South Africa. To follow the work of Indigenous Rights Radio go to https://rights.culturalsurvival.org/enWe then play a speech from Basil El Ghattis at yesterday's Free Palestine rally. Basil is a Palestinian man, son of Palestinian refugee parents, a civil engineer and an active advocate in Palestinian community in Naarm. Yesterday protest marked May Day, and International Workers Day. This International Workers Day marks a reaffirmed commitment to ending the supply of arms to Israeli and Australia's complicity in the production and export of weapons parts.Listeners be ware that this next segment may contain audio images of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who have died, and discussion of Deaths in Custody. If at any point you find the content distressing, please call 13 YARN on 13 92 76. Today the 5th of may 2025 marks the opening to the 'Blak In-Justice: Incarceration and Resilience' exhibit at the Heide Museum of Modern Art, situated on the Birrarung. The exhibit presents works by Vernon Ah Kee, Gordon Bennett, Destiny Deacon, Julie Dowling, Jimmy Pike and Judy Watson addressing the overrepresentation of First Nations people within the carceral system and the crisis of deaths in custody here in so-called australia. These works are shown alongside pieces created by former and currently incarcerated First Nations people via the Torch program to bolster connection to Country and culture. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men are 17 times more likely to be incarcerated than their non-Indigenous counterparts, while Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women are 27 times more likely to be incarcerated compared to non-Indigenous women despite the fact that First Nations people make up less than 4% of the continent's population. 65% of all young people in detention across the continent are Indigenous, despite only making 6.6% of the total population of 10 - 17 year olds. Monday Breakfast was joined by Barkindji man Kent Morris, who is the curator of the 'Blak In-Justice: Incarceration and Resilience' exhibit as well as the Founder and Creative Director of the Torch Program.Songs: 'Blak Matriarchy' - BARKAA'Letter to the Martyrs' - Cacique97' 'Natural Woman' - Kaiit
Vernon Ah Kee explains his creative process and outlook on life.
Artist and curator Tony Albert collects Aboriginalia, colonial kitsch still found in Australia's second-hand and souvenir shops, to reconstruct historic racial stereotypes and reclaim contemporary Indigenous experiences. From ‘Picanniny Floor Polish' to ‘Bally Boomerang Pinball Machines', Sydney-based artist and collector Tony Albert has long been fascinated by Australiana, tourist objects which attempt to define, and commodify, Aboriginal and Torres Strati Islander peoples. Transforming them into grand sculptural installations, his works are political interventions with these vintage objects, and reappropriations of their use and meaning - which refuse to shy away from the shameful status they now hold. One such installation lends its name to Story, Place, a group exhibition in London, which brings together contemporary Indigenous artists from Australia and the diaspora. Tony talks about the plurality of Indigenous identities and lands across Australia, comparing the country's diversity to that of the European continent, and using ‘dreamtimes' to dispel the creation myth of Captain James Cook's Botany Bay landing in 1770. From his working-class upbringing in North Queensland, to working in cities like Brisbane with the likes of Richard Bell and Vernon Ah Kee, he unpacks the importance of collaboration and collective practice. As a member of the Kuku Yalanji peoples, Tony shares his perspectives working within museums and institutions ‘made by white people, for white people' - and why these particular works must travel to Europe and America, to highlight shared colonial histories, and what Aboriginality means today. Sullivan+Strumpf: Story, Place runs at Frieze No.9 Cork Street in London until 21 October, as part of Frieze London 2023. Join the Gallery this Saturday (12 October), for special exhibition tours and artist talks. For more about terra nullius, listen to EMPIRE LINES Australia Season, marking the 30 year anniversary of the Mabo vs. Queensland Case (1992) and Tate Modern's A Year in Art: Australia 1992, with Jeremy Eccles on Judy Watson (https://pod.link/1533637675/episode/e02b445e9c355b30b90c77df1f39264d) and Dr. Desmond Manderson on Gordon Bennett (https://pod.link/1533637675/episode/8ab2ce0a86704edc573cb86a69e845e1 For more on Cigar Store Indians, listen to Anna Ghadar on Mining the Museum at the Maryland Historical Society, Fred Wilson (1992-1993): https://pod.link/1533637675/episode/e02b445e9c355b30b90c77df1f39264d WITH: Tony Albert, multidisciplinary artist and curator. He is the first Indigenous artist on the board of trustees for the Art Gallery of New South Wales, a First Nations Curatorial Fellow, and a founder member of the Brisbane-based collective, proppaNOW, with artists Richard Bell and Vernon Ah Kee. He is the co-curator of Story, Place, with Jenn Ellis. ART: ‘Story, Place, Tony Albert (2023)'. IMAGE: Installation View. PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic. Follow EMPIRE LINES on Twitter: twitter.com/jelsofron/status/1306563558063271936 And Instagram: instagram.com/empirelinespodcast Support EMPIRE LINES on Patreon: patreon.com/empirelines
Audio descriptions and interpretive texts from select works in 'This language that is every stone'.
Audio descriptions and interpretive texts from select works in 'This language that is every stone'.
Do we turn a blind eye to the aggression and militarism — and colonialism — that defined the Italian Renaissance? Plus, hear why artist Vernon Ah Kee can't ignore a distinct Australian brand of racism, and whether a work by the Renaissance painter Artemisia Gentileschi found its way to 1970s Sydney.
Do we turn a blind eye to the aggression and militarism — and colonialism — that defined the Italian Renaissance? Plus, hear why artist Vernon Ah Kee can't ignore a distinct Australian brand of racism, and whether a work by the Renaissance painter Artemisia Gentileschi found its way to 1970s Sydney.
Do we turn a blind eye to the aggression and militarism — and colonialism — that defined the Italian Renaissance? Plus, hear why artist Vernon Ah Kee can't ignore a distinct Australian brand of racism, and whether a work by the Renaissance painter Artemisia Gentileschi found its way to 1970s Sydney.
Do we turn a blind eye to the aggression and militarism — and colonialism — that defined the Italian Renaissance? Plus, hear why artist Vernon Ah Kee can't ignore a distinct Australian brand of racism, and whether a work by the Renaissance painter Artemisia Gentileschi found its way to 1970s Sydney.
The renowned artist talks exhibitionism, public art and the personal message behind his upcoming installation, 'all these scares are mine'.
Breakky host Anna John chats with Dalisa Pigram about the most recent iteration of her solo dance work Gudirr Gudirr which was a highlight of this years exhibition in the art biennale 'The National', in Sydney. They discuss the themes of the work and the transformation of the work from stage to screen, working alongside Vernon Ah Kee. This interview is part of a two-part series focusing on artists of the Kimberley featured in The National 2021. For more info on the work check out: https://www.marrugeku.com.au/ and https://www.the-national.com.au/
A solitary figure emerges from an urgent flurry of charcoal lines. Vernon Ah Kee's “Unwritten” is a potent metaphor for the struggle of indigenous artists to control their identities amid the continuing pressures of racism and colonial oppression. In 2004, Ah Kee began a series of large scale photorealistic charcoal portraits of his family members. These works were based upon ethnographic photos taken by the anthropologist Norman Tyndale on Palm Island during the 1930s. In enlarging these images to an imposing scale, Ah Kee returns power to their gaze, reclaiming the ethnographic photography for those who are once its subjects. Vernon Ah Kee Indigenous Australian, b. 1967 Unwritten, 2011 Charcoal on paper, 29 15/16 x 22 1/16 in. (76.04 x 56.04 cm) Museum purchase from Milani Gallery, 201
Brisbane-based artist Vernon Ah Kee has been making art that asks hard questions for nearly two decades, critiquing systems and racial inequality in contemporary Australia. Plus an interview with Liz Ann Macgregor, director of Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art. The director has since announced she will be leaving the job after 22 years.
Brisbane-based artist Vernon Ah Kee has been making art that asks hard questions for nearly two decades, critiquing systems and racial inequality in contemporary Australia. Plus an interview with Liz Ann Macgregor, director of Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art. The director has since announced she will be leaving the job after 22 years.
Brisbane-based artist Vernon Ah Kee has been making art that asks hard questions for nearly two decades, critiquing systems and racial inequality in contemporary Australia. Plus an interview with Liz Ann Macgregor, director of Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art. The director has since announced she will be leaving the job after 22 years.
Brisbane-based artist Vernon Ah Kee has been making art that asks hard questions for nearly two decades, critiquing systems and racial inequality in contemporary Australia.Plus an interview with Liz Ann Macgregor, director of Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art. The director has since announced she will be leaving the job after 22 years.
Brisbane-based artist Vernon Ah Kee has been making art that asks hard questions for nearly two decades, critiquing systems and racial inequality in contemporary Australia. Plus an interview with Liz Ann Macgregor, director of Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art. The director has since announced she will be leaving the job after 22 years.
Episode Notes A solitary figure emerges from an urgent flurry of charcoal lines. Vernon Ah Kee’s “Unwritten” is a potent metaphor for the struggle of indigenous artists to control their identities amid the continuing pressures of racism and colonial oppression. In 2004, Ah Kee began a series of large scale photorealistic charcoal portraits of his family members. These works were based upon ethnographic photos taken by the anthropologist Norman Tyndale on Palm Island during the 1930s. In enlarging these images to an imposing scale, Ah Kee returns power to their gaze, reclaiming the ethnographic photography for those who are once its subjects. Vernon Ah Kee Indigenous Australian, b. 1967 Unwritten, 2011 Charcoal on paper, 29 15/16 x 22 1/16 in. (76.04 x 56.04 cm) Museum purchase from Milani Gallery, 2012
This panel discussion takes off from the work of INFRACTIONS, specifically its use of the moving image to address the colonial infrastructure and cultural dimension of fossil gas expansions. The conversation looks to discuss the relationship between ‘the situation’ of gas-fired futures, matters of cultural responsibility, survival, and refusal. Join Que Kenny, Phillip Marrii Winzer, Vernon Ah Kee, and INFRACTIONS director Rachel O’Reilly to discuss the work of doing things otherwise. Hosted by Warraba Weatherall. Que Kenny (Western Arrarnta) is a community support worker, artist and activist from Ntaria (Hermannsburg), west of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory, also studying law at Deakin University, Melbourne. She has been involved in grassroots campaigns against the Northern Territory Emergency Response (‘The Intervention’) since 2007, and against Northern Territory gas fracking with the Protect Country Alliance. She has contributed to numerous fictional and environmental films and community projects, and accompanied INFRACTIONS to the Berlin and London launch. Her work has been profiled in Rolling Stone magazine and the Guardian. Phillip Marrii Winzer is a Ngarabul and Wirrayaraay Murri, a member of Warriors of the Aboriginal Resistance, and former Organising Manager for Seed Indigenous Youth Climate Network. They are currently involved in activism around deaths in custody and refugee detention. In June they organized a crowd funder to buy back 20 acres of stolen land near the defunct Kingsgate Mines at Red Range, on Ngarabul country, rich in biodiversity and cultural heritage. Vernon Ah Kee is a member of the Kuku Yalandji, Waanji, Yidinji, and Gugu Yimithirr peoples. His internationally renowned practice addresses ongoing colonial injustice and ancestral relations through conceptual text-based works and installations. His work, tall man (2010) used handheld camera footage of a community gathering on Palm Island following the release of the results of a coronial inquiry into Cameron Doomadgee’s death. Rachel O’Reilly is an artist, writer, curator and PhD researcher at Goldsmiths’ Centre for Research Architecture. She is the director of INFRACTIONS now showing at the IMA, the final work of the ongoing project The Gas Imaginary (2013-2020). Recent curatorial collaborations include Ex-Embassy, Berlin; Planetary Records: Performing Justice between Art and Law, Contour Biennale; and Feminist Takes on Black Wave Film for Sternberg Press. She writes with Jelena Vesic on Non-Aligned Movement legacies and Danny Butt on artistic autonomy. She teaches How to Do Things with Theory at the Dutch Art Institute.
Artist Vernon Ah Kee recites the text to his work "many lies" (2004) at the opening of the exhibition "Everywhen: The Eternal Present in Indigenous Art from Australia," on display February 5 through September 18, 2016 at the Harvard Art Museums. Recorded February 4, 2016 by R. Leopoldina Torres with permission of the artist. Copyright President & Fellows of Harvard College.
In this talk we explore the creative, technical, cultural and collaborative practice of creating VR from personal histories for this moving new work. A Thin Black Line is an immersive VR experience that follows one family in the aftermath of the bombing of Darwin in 1942, when half the population fled believing a Japanese invasion was imminent. Among them was Indigenous filmmaker Douglas Watkin’s mother, just five-years old at the time. Director Douglas Watkin, VRTOV's VR director Oscar Raby, artist Vernon Ah Kee and lead 3D artist Kalonica Quigley shared behind-the-scenes footage and early drawings from their unique journey bringing oral storytelling to digital life through graphic and game design. See A Thin Black Line free from 3 March in the Untold Australia VR Showcase in our permanent exhibition Screen Worlds. About The Speakers Douglas Watkin Brisbane-based Indigenous filmmaker Douglas Watkin was born in Cairns, Far North Queensland. His broadcasting and filmmaking career began in television doing small news reports and producing various corporate videos, and has progressed to feature films, broadcast series and multimedia works for a range of clients and audiences. Douglas has been actively working in the film and television industry for over twenty years, including producing and directing multiple series for ABC and NiTV. Oscar Raby Oscar Raby is an award-winning multimedia artist and Creative Director of independent digital production studio VRTOV. His Virtual Reality documentary Assent (2013), about the Chilean dictatorship, has been exhibited world-wide including screening at Sundance New Frontier, IDFA DocLab and Sheffield Doc/Fest where it received the Audience Choice Award for Cross-platform. Kalonica Quigley Kalonica is a 3D Artist and Game Developer who has developed award-winning games with small teams and independently. She currently works as Lead 3D Artist at VRTOV, an independent studio that crafts virtual reality experiences at the borderline of film and games. Vernon Ah Kee Born in Far North Queensland and currently living in Brisbane, Vernon is a member of the Kuku Yalandji, Waanji, Yidinji and Gugu Yimithirr peoples. Vernon’s multi-faceted practice includes works that range from large-scale drawings of his ancestors to hard-hitting text-based works and installations. In his work Ah Kee fuses the history and language of colonisation with contemporary black/white political issues in an ongoing investigation of race, colour and politics. Through clever puns and plays on words and objects Ah Kee fuses the history and language of colonisation with contemporary black/white political issues to expose degrees of underlying racism in Australian society.
This episode of The Hanging reviews 'Not an Animal or a Plant' an exhibition at National Art School Gallery by Gabby Chantiri.
Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art’s Curator of Indigenous Art Bruce McLean in-conversation with Brisbane-based artist Vernon Ah Kee. McLean has worked with Ah Kee on a number of occasions, including My Country, I Still Call Australia Home: Contemporary Art from Black Australia (2013) at QAGOMA. For this event, they discuss Ah Kee’s practice, engaging specifically with his new work for Imaginary Accord.
Guardian Australia's culture team head to Adelaide to sample all the delights of the festival. We talk to Christos Tsiolkas about drug use and the writing process, and the place of literature in Australia; we welcome festival director David Sefton onto the podcast for discussion of our festival moments; and discuss the work of artist Vernon Ah Kee. And away from the international festival, Jane Howard brings us her first dispatch from the Fringe
Our final podcast comes from Goma. Vernon Ah Kee and curator Bruce McLean reflect on anger in Aboriginal art, and Opera Queensland's Lindy Hume discusses shaking up the artform
National Gallery of Australia | Audio Tour | National Indigenous Art Triennial 07
I started this series of drawings with my ‘heroes’. A portrait of my grandfather, Mick Miller. He was larger than life and held a special role in society. Grandfathers are already fully evolved when you meet them. Their personality is not evolving or growing, it’s set in stone…Different to the father–son relationship. Grandfathers have an immediate fondness toward their grandchildren. They are also very much heroes to everyone in the family. I thought it was natural to want to portray them on a large scale, to make them large drawings. If I made a video of my grandfather I would want it to be projected really big… I’ve done a few self-portraits in pastels to try it in the past, but other than that. not many. It’s really just like any self-portrait – I just do whatever strikes me at the time. I have license to make any comment that strikes me. They also say more about me than any other work because they are unavoidably me. When I am making them I don’t have to worry about making the subject look good, or portray myself as big, brave, sexy or handsome, because I don’t need to. There is more to say in being honest and conveying a sense of an Aboriginal experience in each of my self portraits. Now I have the opportunity to make more self portraits which offers the opportunity to find out more about myself… …the other part of the drawing is of my grandfather Mick Miller. All of my other portraits of my grandfather have been of him as a young man, taken from museum photographic records. Whereas here he is drawn as I remember him, a 70-year-old man. In the corner a tag reads ‘Waanyi Man, Lawn Hill, Palm Island’. He was a Waanyi man sent to Palm Island, where he met my grandmother, who was born there. I was pleased to do this work as it’s me and my grandfather. I am very comfortable in recreating our relationship, but I’m also adding a new dialogue. Here I’m posed in museum style with a front and side profile, which is poetic as it’s like the standard museum photographs of my grandfather…I’ve also rendered myself in a different way from any other portrait I’ve done. Here I’ve used thick broad strokes to marks that look like cuts on skin. This is commenting on my grandfather’s life as a young man and the tough life of that generation living in north Queensland. I wouldn’t have taken this approach in creating another person’s portrait. Vernon Ah Kee, interview by Bruce McLean, Artlines, no.2–2007, pp.14–15.