Som Chai meets my family & friends
I am so excited that Som Chai is now in Oz and has been granted a partner visa.
He's met my family and friends, and even come along to Uni with me.
It is wonderful having him here with me - no more lonely nights or awkward outings on my own!
I can throw my wish list in the fire now because he fulfils all my dreams. I am so proud of him - he is charismatic, generous and kind, and he is also Budhist and a meditator!
I wondered whether there was a difference between art made by a human and art made by a machine? So I made a fan that painted, and I became a painting human fan.
Conclusion: there was no difference.
Just an Ordinary Peasant is based on my uncle’s experience as an inmate at Treblinka extermination camp in 1944. His memoir recounts that while being forced to carry corpses from the gas chambers to an open-air pyre, he was handed a sack which held little children who were still alive. The guard commanded the sack be thrown into the fire. The woman I play in Just an Ordinary Peasant is a hybrid character created from the memoirs of my uncle, my parents and my own research. She sings and dances and also throws a sack of babies into the fire. This piece explores my own biases as well as questions the culpability of ‘ordinary people’ who were accomplices to the atrocities carried out during the Third Reich.
Déjà vu, Watch Out Jew!
The project ‘Déjà vu, Watch Out Jew!’ involves dressing up and performing a variety of personas that comment on my family’s history, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and my concern with the continuing presence of anti-Semitism.
The project consists of 7 video works:
Miss World Peace (Melbourne Rally)
Some of these pieces have been created as a response to my parents’ repeated stories of their war time experiences. Other pieces have been created as an interruption of current political ideologies that I perceive as displaying dangerous racial biases. All of the works are interconnected.
Together they serve as a visual caution on the dangers of prejudice.