SUFFERING LAID BARE
TENSE PAST Julie Gough Until November 3 TMAG, Hobart
Tense Past is on for quite a while at the TMAG, and that’s a good thing because this exhibition is one that will warrant multiple visits. There’s a lot to take in, but this is what we expect for a show that delves deeply into the 25-year-career of significant Tasmanian Aboriginal artist, Julie Gough.
It’s almost reductive to try and sum up Gough’s work, but if there is one thing that she is doing in her art practice, it is addressing colonial history. Gough, who also trained as an archaeologist, has done astonishing research as part of her work, and she looks for the missing and erased Tasmanian Aboriginal people who were abused and/or murdered.
A large part of what Gough’s work does is bring these deliberately removed historical facts — and people — into sharp light. If this sounds a little academic, the work is far from that — it is in fact achingly personal.
Gough, on her maternal side, is of the Trawlwoolway people, who traditionally came from Tebrikunna, and she is able to trace the history of her ancestors: she is directly connected to stories her work tells. This personal immediacy makes her work emotionally powerful, and the show overall is profoundly confronting.
This personal insight is what is important about this exhibition and is something which underpins Gough’s whole art practice — as well as her mission to uncover the truth. I have no doubt this must be painful work for her, to look so hard at a terrifying, brutal past, but she’s strong enough to do so and she clearly feels a drive to make work that reveals the facts.
It’s important as well to note that it’s not just the past that Gough deals with; it is also the present, and one of the most powerful works in this show dealing with the now is The Gathering. For this work, Gough drove past many, many Tasmanian colonial estates, all of which still exist, and some of which still house the families of original colonists.
The work shows gates and fences that shut land off. Gough would stop her car, and grab a rock from these places, claiming something back. It’s a daring gesture, but this is what Gough does: she dares to confront, to show the whole awful picture, to tell the harrowing stories, and show how these histories are still
present. Gough presents a lot of history and uses a wide variety of mediums and strategies to bring out the points in her work.
Examples of these include historical documents and artefacts as part of the work, as well as objects she has searched for and subtly altered; maps, digital animations, video and sculpture. She talks about land, and people, and what happened, and what is still happening.
This is tough stuff, but the reality Gough works with is far harsher. When we look at her series, Hunting Ground, we are shown colonial art with red stains and facts about massacres.
When we look at a Murder of Crows, we are reminded that Aboriginal People were dehumanised by being referred to as crows. We are shown what happened, and what happened here.