Artline

Susan Fereday is a practicing artist who works with photography, installation and sculptural objects. Since 1988 Susan has held fourteen ...

Susan Fereday is a practicing artist who works with photography, installation and sculptural objects. Since 1988 Susan has held fourteen solo exhibitions in Australia. What gives Susan an edge over her fellow artists is the fact that Susan has also been teaching in a number of art colleges and is presently taking lectures at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Media Art Theory and Photography. Her art training has been in Photography and Critical Theory. Last week she gave an illustrated talk in the Department of Fine Arts, Punjab University on 8220;Imaging the Other; ethnicity, aboriginality, individuality and difference in recent Australian photography8221;. Her talk gave a great insight to what is happening far away in Australia and the post modernist approach taken by the art educators and practicing artists.

Post colonial discourse does not mean that colonial practices are over but on the contrary they are currently transforming and reappearing in other, perhaps more subtle ways. Colonialism has its impact over the ruled for ages to come, the effects are both good and bad in their own ways, one being, that it leaves the native to be distinguished as the other. It is this 8220;other8221; that has been conveniently constructed by the hegemonics discourse. The colonized or the ruled is inferior. The native is alienated from his own world. He becomes an instrument in the hand of the colonizer. He is projected to the world as the colonizer would want him to be projected. And like so many native societies who suffer the consequences of foreign rule the Aboriginal people of Australia have experienced the same displacement as the Indians or the Africans.

The 8220;Aborigines8221; are Australians whose ancestors were the first people to live in Australia. They belong to the Australian geographical race. In the late 18th century when the Europeans started making their way into Australia, they considered the Aborigines a primitive people, treated them bad and occupied their land. Today the Aborigines population is about one percent of the country8217;s population. Most of them still face unofficial discrimination and prejudice, and are underprivileged. The individual identity of the people has suffered at the hands of the foreign dominant culture. It is the aim of the post colonialist to bring these natives from the periphery to the center.

Presenting her findings through the history of photographic portraiture which Susan says 8220;maybe reads as a history of power relations, in that the subject of every portrait is positioned by class, ethnicity, gender and social status by a complex series of codes which operate beyond depiction of likeness or personality. This construction is perhaps never more apparent than in the tradition of the nineteenth century ethnographic portraiture, in which colonial interests sought to classify indigenous people as Anthropological specimens. Here the subject was presented as the disenfranchise.

Susan highlighted the recent trends of a number of Australian photographers who have chosen to highlight and critique historical portraits of Aboriginal people in order to challenge current dominant social values which still circumscribe racial difference. 8220;These photographers of both Aboriginal and non Aboriginal descent- aim to critique representation of Aboriginal people, not only to challenge the conventions of stereotype, racial prejudice, and repression, but to reinstate Aboriginal people as a visible vigorous positive contemporary social presence. They must not be projected as what they are thought to be but as what they are8221;, she said.

Photography like other arts is a way to bring forth the real identities of people and not just images. Illustrating her lecture through the works of Australian photographers like Linda Sproul, Michael Arid, and Leah King Smith, Susan said 8220;This is achieved by revisiting historical portraits which are brutal in their strategy is to recuperate archival images by re-photographing them, re-contextualising them-to render opaque their operative representational codes8221;.

This emergent patter of portraiture of Aboriginal people can be read as part of the larger current of expanding self awareness in Australia as the nation addresses the historical atrocities and injustices inflicted upon the Aboriginal people in the past. Much of this contemporary photographic activity is centered on throwing light on the way these repressions now occur. And more complex post colonial practice provide not only a rapture and a positive awareness of the way colonial representations have shaped reality for the colonized, but articulate the experience for their colonizer as well, since both are in extricable bound by the same order.

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But then history is not merely a serious of facts or fixed events but a constant process of renewal. Susan felt that 8220;The past is the product of our present awareness, our identity, the legacy of our ethnic heritage keeping in mind a productive future8221;. Susan through the post colonialist critique is building a connection between the past and the present by breaking the facade that has been existing ever since the foreigner came and ruled over the native land.