Hedberg Talks: Future Nostalgia

Hedberg Talks: Future Nostalgia

Saturday 11 March
3:00pm - 3:45pm

Ian Potter Recital Hall at The Hedberg

Book Tickets

If you could look into the future of Australia, what would you see? What did we get right and what are we still learning? Would our hubris continue to ignore our future ancestors?

Join UTAS Pro Vice-Chancellor Aboriginal Leadership Greg Lehman and exhibiting artist Jenna Lee in conversation with UTAS Director, Curatorial and Cultural Collections Caine Chennatt, to delve into art, the history of future possibilities, and hope as a muscle.

We ask: How might we break out of Western notions of linear time and hold imaginations of the far futures in our present today alongside our just as we do our past? How will we have changed the course of our trajectory (or not)?

Speakers: Greg Lehman and Jenna Lee, facilitated by Caine Chennatt.

About the speakers

Professor Greg Lehman

Professor Greg Lehman is a well-known Tasmanian art historian, curator, essayist and commentator on Indigenous identity and place. Descended from the Trawulwuy people of north east Tasmania, Greg has an intimate relationship with the island’s Indigenous culture and his creative works explore the impact of colonisation on Tasmania’s social fabric.

Prior to his appointment as Pro Vice Chancellor, Aboriginal Leadership at the University of Tasmania in January 2020, Greg was a McKenzie Research Fellow at the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. Following his appointment as an Indigenous Visiting Research Fellow at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies in 2011, Greg worked in a number of research roles at the Australian National University’s National Centre for Indigenous Studies and Deakin University’s Institute for Koori Education.

Jenna Lee

Jenna Lee is a Gulumerridjin (Larrakia), Wardaman and KarraJarri Saltwater woman with mixed Japanese, Chinese, Filipino and Anglo-Australian ancestry. Using art to explore and celebrate her many overlapping identities, Lee works across sculpture, installation, and body adornment. She also works with moving images, photography and projection in the digital medium.

With a practice focused on materiality and ancestral material culture, Lee works with notions of the archive, histories of colonial collecting, and settler-colonial books and texts. Lee ritualistically analyses, deconstructs and reconstructs source material, language and books, transforming them into new forms of cultural beauty and pride, and presenting a tangibly translated book.

Driven to create work in which she, her family, and the broader mixed First Nations community see themselves represented, Lee builds on a foundation of her father’s teachings of culture and her mother’s teachings of papercraft.

Caine Chennatt

Caine Chennatt is currently Director, Curatorial and Cultural Collections at the University of Tasmania, where he bridges the university’s collections, galleries, museums, and art commissioning projects with all audiences through an approach of cultural humility. His curatorial work explores plural cultural identities and expanded ways of knowing. Prior to joining the university, he produced arts engagement, access and inclusion, and digital programs at the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery and was awarded a Churchill Fellowship to research inclusion within galleries. He is the current Chair of the Council of Australian University Museums and Collections and a board member of Second Echo Ensemble. Outside the cultural sector, Caine is an accredited mediator and conflict-resolutionist.

About this event

This panel is a public program associated with the exhibition Out of the Everywhen and co-presented by Theatre Royale and Ten Days on the Island as part of The Hedberg Talks - an ongoing program of ideas and conversations housed in The Hedberg.

Out of the Everywhen

In 1988, a group of Indigenous and non-Indigenous printmakers and art organisations from across Australia produced a series of 32 screen-print posters titled Right Here Right Now - Australia 1988 in response to the nation’s bicentennial festivities. It provided a strong alternative narrative to the official message of celebration, acutely capturing the state of our nation as it relates to themes including the dispossession of Aboriginal people, the environment, demands for justice, and land rights. It also provided a powerful acknowledgment of the survival of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture.

35 years on, this significant body of work provides a springboard for a new group of artists to project themselves into the future. How have we managed to change the course of our trajectory (or not)? What will we get right, what are we still learning, and in what ways has our hubris continued to ignore our future ancestors? Artists in this exhibition invite us to imagine and actively create the world we want to live in.

This exhibition includes works by artists of the Right Here Right Now series from 1988 alongside artists including Michael Cook, Jordan Cowen, Karla Dickens, Tony Albert, Kait James, Jenna Lee, and Jazz Money.

Curated by Jane Barlow, Caine Chennatt, and Rachael Rose

Opening event:
Thursday 9 March, 5:30 - 8pm

Gallery opening hours:
10 March – 6 May
11am – 4pm Tuesdays – Saturdays
Closed Sundays, Mondays and public holidays