Mallika Sarabhai in SVA Kranti: The Revolution Within at Footscray Community Arts Centre for Asia TOPA, February 28 & 29. Tickets here. Mahatma Gandhi’s principles of Ahimsa (peace) and Satyagraha (non-violence) were guiding forces in India’s freedom struggle against the British rule. Gandhi, like all characters in history, must also be remembered in his totality—flaws and all—but his vision for a total transformation of India has never been more urgent. In SVA KRANTI: The Revolution Within, artist-activist Mallika Sarabhai is seen in conversation with Gandhi – sharing, recounting and lamenting the many injustices faced by women in contemporary India. Women are not only othered on the basis of gender, but also on the basis of religion, caste, class, sexual orientation, ability and tradition. As is said: violence against women in India spans the entire lifecycle, from the womb to the tomb. In SVA KRANTI: The Revolution Within, Sarabhai uses dance, Read More »
OzAsia Festival wrapped up for the year and a feeling of emptiness loomed over me. I have previously attended OzAsia Festival three times, but this is the first time I have made the most of this two-week festival that celebrates Asian and Australian cultures through a series of harmonious community-inclined gatherings and get-togethers, with shows that involve performers coming together from all across the globe, I have long internalised my cultural identity in a bid to integrate myself into Australian society, a society that is miles away from the one I was brought up in. When I touched down in Adelaide nearly 10 years ago, it was on Australia Day. Even though it was my decision to move this far away from home, the first few days in Australia were so difficult, and my levels of homesickness so strong, I nearly booked a ticket back home. Now, looking back on Read More »
Author’s Note: The term East Asian Australian (EAA) has been used to avoid perpetuating East Asian hegemony in discussions of Asian Australianness I once met this tech bro who told me that Samsung was just a copy of Apple and their ‘geniuses’. Anonymous, robot Samsung workers merely stole the work off relatable, everyday Zuckerberg-esque men of Silicon Valley who wore hoodies and ate kale salads. With a defiant, unwavering gaze, he told me that Samsung could not be trusted anyway. I knew immediately we were talking in metaphors. In August last year, the Australian government officially blocked Chinese telecommunications firms, most notably Huawei, from providing equipment to Australia’s new 5G mobile phone networks, on the basis of national security. Subsequent claims made by individuals like federal MP Andrew Hastie stating that “China’s ambitions threatened to erode Australia’s sovereignty and freedoms” point to a rise of Sinophobia imbricated with the emergence Read More »
This essay by Sami Shah is extracted from Split – True Stories of Leaving, Loss and New Beginnings, edited by Lee Kofman (Ventura Press), available now. Forget Me I forgot. That’s where I made the mistake for which I’m paying. I forgot. I forgot how extreme religious extremists can be. I forgot how unforgiving nationalists can be. I forgot all of that. I forgot that Australia isn’t as far from the rest of the world as I hoped it was. And because I forgot, I screwed up. See, I used to be a Muslim from Pakistan. That was my identity. We define our personal identity in many ways: we use gender, sexuality, ethnicity, racial constructs, religion, nationality. We pick and choose whatever aspects we want, but even more often others choose for us. In Pakistan, my identity had more fractal detail; I was a Mohajir, Karachiite, Shia, Burger (it is a Read More »
Where’s the Intersection of Disability and Race?: CB Mako reporting on the ‘Shifting The Balance’ Report launch When I was invited to live-tweet @DiversityArtsAu ‘s #ShiftingTheBalance Report Launch, I couldn’t say no. My inner fangirl squealing, I was excited to be in the same room as two of my favourite podcast hosts, Lena Nahlous from ‘The Colour Cycle’ and Beverley Wang from ‘It’s Not a Race’. I listened to these two podcasts as I slowly cycled on my cargobike, to and from art classes, school runs, and errands. I regularly relistened to these podcasts long after they stopped uploading new episodes. Using the hashtags #ShiftingTheBalance #DiversityArtsAu and #FairPlayCreative, I took photos and threaded tweets as they happened in real time. As soon as the launch finished, Diversity Arts shared the weblink on their social media platforms, inviting people to download #ShiftingTheBalance report for free. For. Free. I wondered how Read More »
浪石響: 山 – Sounding Langshi: Mountain “Sounding Langshi: Mountain was made in the karst mountains of Langshi Village, Guilin, in Southern China. Sounds of paper on rock were bounced against karst formations to articulate my bodily engagement with a familiar trope of Chinese landscape painting. Sound feedback recordings and paper mediators evidence this entanglement between my body and place. The drawing process harnessed the unique acoustics of the site to create a sonic drawing whereby the line of gesture is contained in the line of sound.” “As the piece contained organic matter, Australian Biosecurity and The Department of Agriculture had the work quarantined and examined by plant pathology upon my return to Sydney. It was subsequently gamma irradiated and any potentially living contaminants destroyed. What began as an inquiry into embodied drawing, listening and sounding, came to exemplify some questions surrounding my own global mobility. In negotiating with authorities who Read More »
Luke Siddham Dundon was born in Australia in the mid-90s. His father John Siddham was born in India in the late 1950s and now lives in Australia. We asked them both to reflect on their relationship to gender and culture. Click here to read John’s piece, ‘What’s in a Name’. About a month ago, my dad took me to a nail salon. It was a decision made on a whim, an easy way to catch up during a quiet morning off. We walked in, smiling awkwardly as we were welcomed to sit down. It felt good doing something we both clearly enjoyed, although we knew it wasn’t necessarily a typical father-and-son activity. Over the next half hour, as our toe nails were buffed and shined to perfection, I realised how comfortable I was in my own, now freshly scrubbed and baby-smooth, skin. Dad’s example of being an Asian man has been Read More »
John Siddham was born in India in the late 1950s and now lives in Australia. His son, Luke, was born in Australia in the mid-90s. We asked them both to reflect on their relationship to gender and culture. Click here to read Luke’s piece, ‘Dad Never Taught Me to Man Up’. I grew up in India, a land that has given birth to many religions: Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, and Sikhism, and many others that came to India and still thrive and survive today. As such, India is a land of spirituality and religiosity, a land of thinkers, reformers and philosophers. It is also a land of contrasts and contradictions with extremely rich and poor people, highly educated professionals and illiterate youth, people with compassion to all living beings and yet violence committed against most vulnerable people including women and girls. I had a religious upbringing and had friends in the Read More »
The music industry, both worldwide and here in Australia, is infamous for being a deeply and persistently white and male-dominated sphere. We often focus on stories from women and non-binary folk of colour in the industry, and duly so. But for Peril’s Man Up edition, we asked two Asian-Australian men in music to reflect on their experiences and thoughts around cultural identity, adolescence and gender. Both presenters at FBi Radio in Sydney, and engaged in other facets of the music industry, Darren Lesaguis and Reg Harris have lived and breathed music for as long as they can remember. In an expansive, heartfelt and relatable chat for You Don’t Sound Asian, hear them talk about their conceptions of masculinity, growing up brown and music-obsessed, and so much more. PLUS! Darren and Reg have put together a sweet Spotify playlist with a few of their current faves just for you. Spin it to your heart’s Read More »
Colonisers make women and animals of all their subjects. Under this gaze, women and animals are conquerable because they are not men, and colonised men are feminised or made animal because they are not ‘real’ men. Seeing the rest of the world as incapable of rational, extractive thought is how the world was divided and conquered. The colonised became, according to Said, “a subject race, dominated by a race that knows them and what is good for them better than they could possibly know themselves.” This is important to understanding the ways in which diverse masculinities have been subsumed into Western figurations of the noble savage and the effeminate Other. This imaginary was instrumental to justifying the subjugation of external populations; such historical ideas still linger today in very material ways. Chong Chon-Smith writes that race remains a category of bodily control from a “universal power centre of white national Read More »
Edited extract from ‘#MeToo and the Uneven Distribution of Trauma’ by Shakira Hussein, published in #MeToo: Stories From the Australian Movement (Picador, out now). Republished here with permissions of the publisher and author. #MeToo and the Uneven Distribution of Trauma It wasn’t much of a knife. A household kitchen knife, probably not even the most dangerous knife in his mother’s cutlery drawer. That’s not a knife, Paul Hogan had scoffed. That’s a knife! I didn’t have a machete tucked into my belt ready to bran- dish on the street in London all those years ago, and I was a skinny young brown woman, not a sun-bronzed Aussie bushman, but I tried to act the tough guy – girl – all the same. ‘You’re going to have to try a lot harder than that, if you want to frighten me.’ But it was a knife, of course. And it did frighten Read More »
Shahmen Suku is a performance artist born in Singapore and based in Sydney who explores ideas of racial and cultural identity, religion, gender, the home and the kitchen, food and storytelling in his performances. As his alter ego Radha, he has also hosted many events and parties in Sydney and has become an important figure in the Queer and alternative communities. Radha has presented works for Liveworks at Performance Space, Liquid Architecture, Cement Fondu, appeared in The Set on the ABC as a recurring host in the kitchen. Growing up in a modern matriarchal Indian family in Singapore, Shahmen processes his sense of displacement from home as Radha, the Diva from India. Moving to Australia has given Shahmen multiple perspectives on migration, culture, race, colonisation and gender identity. Some of these issues cannot be discussed openly in Singapore or as himself and finds expression in his alter ego. Radha’s performances Read More »
“I met a woman who told me that she wasn’t attracted to Asians. “No worries,” I said. “I’m not attracted to racists.” ― Simon Tam, The Slants Taking on and breaking open the idea of racialised masculinity in one short edition is almost impossible. And, yet, bringing this edition together feels like nothing less than a rare privilege: ‘right now / it all comes down / to being unprepared for what takes root /’ (Chris Tse, ‘Pedestal Triptych’). Thank you to the many writers, thinkers and creatives who sent their responses to our Man Up edition, which will be coming to you over the next month. If the academic conversation is all about taking a more holistic approach to gender, seriously considering the meaning and relation between femininities and masculinities, the transfer and movement between the historical manifestations of the binary, then how do we, as writers and artists, Read More »
Brisbane will welcome a plethora of acclaimed local, national and international street artists from around the globe this May, as the city opens its door to Australia’s biggest street art festival program – Brisbane Street Art Festival (BSAF) from May 4 – 19. This free public art event has 46 commissioned artworks across Brisbane CBD and surrounding suburbs. With a program of live music, panel talks, exhibitions and workshops, BSAF will have something on offer to suit every age group over the two-week period. Festival Director Lincoln Savage said the public can expect to see more diversity and creative license for artists in 2019, with the program doubling in size from 2018. Savage said, “Our goal is to help create one of the most vibrant and culturally rich cities in Australia that supports the development of emerging artists and continues to empower its creative industries through BSAF.” BSAF has support Read More »
Or, why we’re talking about men, to men and with men this International Women’s Day. This year’s United Nations International Women’s Day theme is think equal, build smart, innovate for change. Hear that, team? Get cracking. So, what will you be doing on this day designed to celebrate women (in the complexity and difference that “women” must now imply), to recognise the barriers which continue to impede equality, and to mobilise for a better collective future? Will you attend a breakfast, or a community celebration, sport a purple ribbon or otherwise virtue signal with a nifty hashtag or purchase of a suitable t-shirt? These are all options. Indeed, many of our team will be doing likewise, with sincerity, cynicism, clarity, reflexivity and hope. Yet in many ways, it’s International Women’s Day every day at Peril. So it feels strange to mark this day out more than others. We were Read More »
Let’s imagine for one moment that the powers in our universe were battled out on a disco dance floor. What would it look like if there were no women? But first, I want to ask the question on a smaller, but equally important, scale – why is it so difficult to find women in positions of leadership in politics, the corporate sphere and tech start ups? How do we become leaders, and get on the proverbial D-floor? And why is it so often that we just aren’t considered on the guest list in the first place? There have of course been movements toward change – take popular politics, all of the ‘firsts’ in female leadership in Investment Banking to Aviation Australia, and the most recent effects of Australia’s version of the #TimesUp Movement. But why are so many jobs still asking women to choose between her career and raising a Read More »
This is a very particular time in the Australian calendar. Here, Christmas holidays and summer combine to create an extended feeling of languor and disorientation; the flurry of December’s capitalism cedes to subdued streets and a succession of sporting fixtures. In many of our coastal capitals, people flee to the beaches. Around about now, however, as children return to school and traffic mounts, it is clear the year has begun in earnest. And so it is for Peril. After a break in December and January, our team has been working on what 2019 looks like for Peril – our strategies and publication plans – all of which are filling us with excitement, and a certain amount of nerves. We have three exciting editions planned for this year, and we can’t wait for you to be a part of creating them. In the early part of 2019, for Edition 35: Man Up, Read More »
I first watched Dr. Anita Ratnam perform when I was seven years old. Over the last two decades, I have followed her trajectory as an artist and went on to write a PhD about her work. Fifteen years ago, my mother commissioned a tour of Ratnam to the Middle East for a fundraiser. In less than two weeks, she will be sharing her craft on Victorian shores in a tour steered by NIDA in partnership with Multicultural Arts Victoria, and supported by Arts Centre Melbourne, St. Martin’s Youth Arts Centre and Chunky Move. I, for one, am personally very excited for Melburnian audiences to experience Ratnam’s aesthetic, and in this essay I provide a birdseye view of the breadth of her repertoire. You can purchase tickets to her solo performance of Ma3Ka and artist talk on December 1st at Chunky Move here. Showing for one night only followed by a Read More »
Stepping into the fantasy of Daniel Kok and Miho Shimizu’s xhe beholds an immediate amplification of the senses. Their world borders between the vicissitudes of childlike fragility and maximal emotion, one where you can’t – even for a second – look away. Its psychedelic surfaces thrive with toys and objects ordinarily found in a kindergarten, suddenly made strange in its divorce from such context. Geometric cardboard cut outs, stick pyramids, plushie toys, foam wedges, and blankets fashioned into avant-garde dress splay in wild colours across the stage, a space enclosed by two walls patterned in similar frenzy. As audience members, we are invited to walk through the mix, to touch and play with the items laid out if the desire strikes, or otherwise, free to sit in the sidelines to observe the action unfolding. At a certain point during xhe’s debut performance at Performance Space’s Liveworks Festival, Kok whips a Read More »
MELODRAMA / RANDOM / MELBOURNE! is an experimental feature film, part two of a Fil-Aus (Filipino-Australian) trilogy. All three films use the sentimentality of cinema to explore Filipino identity in Australia. Part one, I am JUPITER I am the BIGGEST PLANET, is a silent film; part three, MAGANDA! Pinoy Boy vs Milk Man, is a Filipino exploitation film. MELODRAMA / RANDOM / MELBOURNE! is a documentary, drama and ‘glorious cinema-o-ke’, that explores the intersection of gender and race through fragmented images set to pop-punk tunes. My work has always been about the marginalised and those on the fringes. I wanted to highlight a side of Australia not shown in film narratives. I wanted to show the CBD of Melbourne and all its Asian influences. I wanted to take a pencil to the jugular of broken masculinity and highlight the long-suffering experiences of some of the women of my heritage. Aries Santos says Read More »
Midsumma Festival Announcement: Midsumma Festival is proud to announce the recipients of Midsumma Futures. It’s a nine-month development , and mentorship program for emerging artists and culture-makers, kicking off in October 2018. Besides, Midsumma-Futures provides opportunities for early-career-artists for advancing their skills, deepening practice, gaining exposure and leading the future of queer-culture. Moreover, the program brings together a range of emerging cultural-practitioners, creating a unique space for the intersection of ideas and modes of practice. Undoubtedly, the artists range from producers, socially engaged practitioners, community leaders, and culture-makers. Midsumma Festival 2019: Midsumma Festival will reveal itself in all its finery once again. Yes, it’ll bring a kaleidoscope of preeminent queer arts and cultural festivities from 19 January to 10 February 2019. It’s since 1988 that Midsumma Festival has been celebrating LGBTQIA+cultures. It’s been offering Melbourne audiences a diverse array of performances, talks and social events with leading local and global artists. Read More »
