The Unbound Collective

The Unbound Collective brings together years of research in a performance that moves through spaces that have historically seen Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians excluded and reduced to tell untold chapters of Australia’s true history.

The Collective is Ali Gumillya Baker (curator), Simone Ulalka Tur, Faye Rosas Blanch and Natalie Harkin.

Ali Gumillya Baker shifts the colonial gaze through film, performance, projection, and grandmother-stories.

Simone Ulalka Tur’s performance and poetics enact an intergenerational transmission of story-work through education.

Faye Rosas Blanch engages rap theory to embody sovereignty and shedding of the colonial skin.

Natalie Harkin's archival-poetics is informed by blood-memory, haunting and grandmother-stories.

Unbound Act 1

Unbound Act 2

Unbound Act 1

Bound and Unbound: Sovereign Acts –
decolonising methodologies of the lived and spoken

Fontanelle Gallery, 24 August - 24 September 2014.

This intially experimental work aimed to explore complex ideas of being both bound and free; what we are bound to historically and, as sovereign people, what we choose to (un)bind ourselves to and from, both now and into the future.

This is a selection of works from the exhibition.

Bound and Unbound Act 1 catalogue

The colonial imagination/down among the wild men, 2014

Digital video, Ali Gumillya Baker

It so Hip to be BLAK, 2014

Digital video, Faye Rosas Blanch and Ali Gumillya Baker

Archive Fever Paradox [2] / Whitewash-Brainwash, (excerpt) 2014

Digital video, Natalie Harkin

Archive Fever Paradox [2] / Ode to the Board of Anthropological Research, 2014

Digital video, Natalie Harkin

Tall ships part 2, 2014

Digital video, Ali Gumillya Baker

Dedication Song, 2014 (WAV file 32Mb)

Simone Ulalka Tur and Katie Inawantji Morrison.

Thanks to Nancy Bates for assistance with the adaptation to a song of the Dedication poem by Mona Ngitji Ngitji Tur.

Unbound Act 2

Bound and Unbound: Sovereign Acts – Act II

Bound and Unbound: Act 2 built on the successful experimental Act 1 exhibition at Fontanelle Gallery 24 August- 21 September 2014 extending the ideas and their expression. The performative aspects of Act 1 contributed to engaging Aboriginal community members who have historically been excluded from non-Indigenous run cultural spaces. When Aboriginal people’s voices are heard and listened to, this compels an engagement with the broader Aboriginal community. In Adelaide spaces of representation are often bound, and through performative acts such as song, we can be unbound.

Act 2 was a project in three stages. Two performances and accompanying images and installation narrative on 10 bus shelters in shelters in the city and Adelaide suburbs to coincide with TARNANTHI Contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Visual Art Festival in October 2015, performed in the outdoor space between the Flinders City Gallery and State Library Institute Building on North Terrace.

Act 2 speaks back to colonial institutions of power as dominant repositories of culture/knowledge. These institutions on North Terrace contain many founding documents and historic journals, letters, images and diaries of non-Indigenous explorers and colonists, as well as their depictions of Aboriginal people. Within these collections are representations of the artist’s families and communities. Unbound Act 2 performed, projected and responded to these imposed colonial spaces. We retold the rarely told histories of these spaces from Indigenous embodied perspectives.