Porous Borders
Pygmalion Studio, Famagusta, Northern Cyprus, 4-6 June 2003
Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, Western Australia, 24 July - 31
August 2003
Victorian
College of the Arts Gallery, Melbourne, 2004
Span Galleries, Melbourne, Victoria, 7 - 18 June 2005
Porous
Borders addresses
current migration and refugee issues in Australia and globally. The work
relates to heightened global anxieties over border-protection and consists
of 56 pictures of children's faces dispersed amongst images of waves.
Australia's most recent border-protection 'crisis'; dates from mid to
late 2001 when a higher than usual number of boats began arriving, via
Indonesia, carrying refugees from Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan. During this
period a number of significant events occurred very closely together;
the most notorious of these being the 'children overboard affair' in which
it was claimed that refugees entering Australian waters threw their children
into the sea in order to be rescued and granted asylum.
As this incident occurred during a federal election campaign in October 2001, its use to win votes from an already fearful population (primed to distrust strangers a month after September 11) was viewed by some as cynical. Although every subsequent enquiry has exonerated the refugees involved and exposed the information promulgated by the governing party as fallacious, the momentum of 'world-terror' rhetoric threatened to carry the majority of Australians further towards isolationism.
It is relatively recently that a critical mass of people has emerged to protest against Australia's current refugee policies through the huge peace marches that have strongly linked the primary cause of statelessness to war. Porous Borders seeks to contribute to this positive momentum.
Refugees swimming from the sinking Olong to an Australian Navy rescue craft, 7 October 2001
