2017

Two videos and a suite of collages that grapple with the underlying tensions of colonialism in the remote town of Kununurra where the artist lived and was raising children.

//At the time of making these works, Alana Hunt lived on Miriwoong Country and shot these works near her home, in and around the town of Kununurra in Western Australia, the state with the highest rates of incarceration for Aboriginal people in Australia. Her works are enacted with a measured calm that unsettles the familiar and unravels relationships between histories of colonial violence and the persistence of that violence under the surface of the everyday. They are full of what Elizabeth Povinelli describes as “otherwise” possibility, disturbing the dominant way of seeing social, political and economic order; creating other ways of seeing. In all these works, the calm suburban familiarity undoes our sense of the ‘outback’.

Between Home and the Police and Between Neighbours and Nations (both 2017) were originally created for the exhibition Landing Points co-curated by Dr Hayley Megan French and Dr Lee-Anne Hall at Penrith Regional Gallery and the Lewers Bequest. In Between Home and the Police we follow a silent, haunting journey through the town, with a slow, mesmerising pace through streets that are uncannily unpeopled. The route starts at Alana’s then home and ends at the town’s police station, a route Lee-Anne Hall describes as “made familiar by colour.” The calm and quiet belie the question how you see this route, the ambiguity of how terrifying this route might be: whether you are seeking the help of the police or whether any encounter with the law carries the threat of violence. Between Neighbours and Nations depicts details of fences in the town. It’s quiet detachment speaks to demarcations of enclosure: ours and yours, public and private, the assertion of property overlaid on Country, and of national borders and Australia’s offshore prisons. Hunt does not show us the homes built on stolen land or the lives unfolding behind the fences. The fences themselves suggest invisible social boundaries, divisions within communities and marked disparities of wealth and equity.//

From the exhibition catalogue of Dreams Nursed in Darkness, curated by Claire Taylor and Elizabeth Day