February 2022
Front Gallery

SIYING ZHOU (VIC)
Calling The Dead

What does the past of Australia mean to today’s immigrants? Do immigrants have the moral right to tell the history about Australia? How does immigrant’s engagement in the Australian history reshape the conception of truth and others’ imagination about the past? By showing a six-channel video installation, a photograph printed on a curtain and an altered LED sign, this exhibition uses multiple media to create a hybrid narrative space in which the contemplation of these questions can be situated. In this exhibition, the Chinese history in Ararat is presented through video narrative and imagined from the visual and audio cues. By showing the new tombstones of the Chinese graves in the Ararat cemetery in juxtaposition with the displays in Gum San Chinese Heritage Centre; by placing the narration of personal memories about the Chinese by the local European descendants in context of the artist’s representation of the Chinese history in Ararat, this exhibition propels the examination towards the authenticity of the narrated historical content and the conception of history. It also intends to underline a slippery relationship between immigrants and the Australian history. In front of the Australian history, immigrants are not only culturally othered but also othered by time.