17 FEB – 5 MAY 2024

OPENING NIGHT: 6pm FRIDAY 16 FEB 2024

This new body of work from Wanjun Carpenter explores contemporary complacency and ignorance of First Nations’ issues in modern-day Australia. For the artist, white Australia has consistently and wilfully ignored the trauma of Australia’s colonial invasion and its aftermath, and he views social media and AI technologies, as adding another layer of confusion, lies and distraction.

His strong activist title Look around reflects a history of civil rights language and activism, and a critique of popular culture. It is a tradition that includes Gill Scott-Heron’s anthem, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, which critiqued televisual culture in 1971. In Look around (it’s not all roses), Wanjun encourages us to look beyond our screens, to view ourselves and our society from multiple perspectives, and understand the reality of First Nations dispossession, and the fact that sovereignty has never been ceded.

About Wanjun Carpenter

Wanjun Carpenter is a mixed media artist and musician from Muloobinba (Newcastle), NSW. A Gunggandji man, Wanjun works across diverse creative fields and contexts, with his artistic focus centred on exploring his own indigenous identity. Wanjun employs a unique approach to storytelling to examine the constructs, misrepresentations, questions and tensions inherent within his sense of identity.

Wanjun’s arts practice and style draws upon his work as an electronic music producer and visuals creator for dance events. Largely working with experimental video and projection mapping, he frequently utilises various digital programs and obsolete analogue hardware. Often, he uses these elements in conjunction with other materials, such as dirt, found objects and building products. In this way, he constructs ‘real-life’, interactive scenes to engage his audience as not simply viewers, but as agents of narrative and, in turn, social change themselves.