Counter-monuments: Challenging distorted colonial histories through contemporary art and memorial practices

This webinar is the fourth in the Australian Centre’s 2022 Critical Public Conversations series: Undoing Australia.

Increasingly across the globe, statues and monuments celebrating imperial conquest and colonial oppression are being defaced, recontextualised, removed by authorities or spectacularly toppled by protestors. It is evident from such acts that public memorials have become significant sites for inciting debate and action on the histories and ongoing legacies of colonial and racist violence.

In Australia, it is routinely noted that there are contradictions in public remembrances that tend to honour white settler lives and accomplishments over Indigenous ones, and a culture of active silence on the violence of colonialism in public presentations of the past. In response, many contemporary Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists have produced public “counter-monuments” to make visible contested histories. In this lecture, Genevieve Grieves and Amy Spiers will discuss how the public’s view of colonial history and its legacies can be confronted and transformed through creative counter-monument practice by drawing on a number of contemporary Australian examples.

Presenters