All the violence within / In the national interest
2020-23
All the violence within and In the national interest are two collections of images surveilling—like a crime scene—the violence inherent in threads of daily life as seemingly benign as leisure and development.
Although this work was first written about by Robert Wood for Semaphore in 2020, it wasn't shown publicly until 2021 when Abigail Moncrieff curated The National 2021: New Australian Art at Carriageworks (Gadigal Land/Sydney). In this exhibition six images from the collection were shown on three double sided light boxes—like two sides of the same coin.
It is your perpetual impossible predicament, how can you reconcile fondness of memory and desire, with your complicity in acts of brutal environmental and social violence? Maybe you cannot but you can face the banality of such violence.
This is what strikes me most about Alana Hunt’s photographs which expanded beyond the concreteness of the image into conversations, books, and relationships. Her lens seems to surveil the people and acts in the places she photographs, as though she were documenting the landscape, the colonial mythscape, as a crime scene. She reminds us that colonial violence has not ended and while its forms are continually shifting it still requires active participants to sustain it.
Throughout the course of The National Alana was Carriageworks' inaugural writer in residence working on Conversations and Correspondence. The six exchanges that unfold within Conversations and Correspondence were spurred by photographs from All the violence within and In the national interest, and together reveal part of a relational constellation of people and place that underpins her practice as a whole, and these images specifically.
Over the course of The National 2021 these texts were progressively published on the Carriageworks Journal. They were later materialised in print via Borderline Books, and as recorded readings broadcast on Port Hedland Commumity Radio and in subsequent exhibitions:
Trespassing with Chris Griffiths and David Newry
Relations with Narelle Jubelin and Diana Wood Conroy
Gluttony with Mona Bhan
Impossibilities with Jazz Money
Tensions with Kush Badhwar
Wit with the late, Ross Gibson
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”While we do not always discuss the images directly they are, in each case, a common point of departure—forging paths to innumerable destinations. We speak through agendas of development and colonisation and leisure, coursing through our lives and the places we hold dear. We speak of viruses and airports and tourism, of altered ecosystems and large dams and jinns and police, of gold mines and gravel pits and missed communications, of interminable fallacies and important impossibilities, of simple joys and the beauty of perseverance, of forensic accountability and the value of imagination, and, perhaps with most urgency, we delve into ourselves and this Country.”
Alana Hunt
In 2025 a bootleg photocopied edition of this book was produced, making the publication slightly more affordable, and continuing its circulation:
Further Reading
Seven Myths You Should, Tristen Harwood, exhibition text. 2022
The National 2021 artist text by Tai Spruyt
Beyond Museology: The National 2021, Tess Maunder, Art Monthly Australasia, 27 August, 2021
The National 2021, by Tristen Harwood, The Saturday Paper No.343 April 2021
It’s a love letter to those women who haven’t been seen, by Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen, Sydney Morning Herald, 25 March 2021
All the violence within this, by Robert Wood, Semaphore, July 2020
Exhibitions
All the violence within, Sweet Pea Gallery, March 04 2023 – March 25 2023 (exhibition catalogue)
All the violence within, The Courthouse Gallery and Studio, Kariyarra Country / Port Hedland, 2022
The National 2021: New Australian Art, Carriageworks, Sydney, 26 March - 20 June 2021
credits
This work has been supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund (2019), a Regional Artist Fellowship through the State Government’s Regional Arts and Cultural Investment Program and Regional Arts WA (2020-21), Carriageworks and The Courthouse Gallery.
Installation images by Zan Wimberley, courtesy Carriageworks.