“SAV/OUR” - A collaboration with artist Kait James

FRONT BEACH BACK BEACH - 18th - 26th November 2022 Sullivan Bay, Vic on Boonwurrung Country

Front Beach, Back Beach was a Public art festival showcasing eighteen leading Australian artists explore fifteen extraordinary sites, histories and communities that have shaped the Mornington Peninsula. ⁠

Co-conceived by The Mornington Peninsula Art Gallery & The Public art Commission, and generously supported by the RISE Fund, the site-responsive commissions will be presented across the Peninsula this November 2022, followed by a summer exhibition at the Gallery.

Curational Statement:

Artists Jarra Karalinar Steel and Kait James’ artwork SAV/OUR operates to disrupt and embed itself into the many possible layers and conceptions of place – across time, space, and the singular and multiple body. As First Nation artists working and within a public art project, the relational is foreground where a place-based framework almost invariably inherits complexities of colonial imposition. These complexities mirror, for First Nations people more widely, colonisation’s continual insistence in both art as in life – the artist and the individual not easily nor necessarily essential to separate – both generally and within the conception of the 'public artwork’.

As a collaborative artwork, SAV/OUR ’s methodology nullifies the largely unquestioned ‘settlement’ narrative and associated fable, which otherwise frame (and fame) ‘Sullivan Bay’ as part of a wider colonial overlay. Steel and James’s artwork appropriate and remediate, as necessary, the relational modalities of said fables – including the ‘white saviour’ archetype as it continues to exist both problematically and unnecessarily. In relating to a public, SAV/OUR ’s various elements operate to assert the sovereign and subvert the relational aspects of the complex framework at its basis.

This work is generously supported by Centre for Projection Art (CPA).

Curated by Steven Rhall