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.
Miss World Peace
in the Middle East
This project is divided into 8 subset projects:
Miss World Peace attends Protests for Peace
This project continues with my alter ego, ‘Miss World Peace’. Not the young and sexy version, but an old, worn-out, but still determined one.
For four years my job was to spread good will and hope to people everywhere with kind words and positive gestures. My first appearance was in Melbourne in 2009 during anti-Israel protests. Subsequent visits included Thailand and former concentration camps in Europe.
While I was living in Israel for several months, I became intrigued and concerned by the politics there. So I dressed in my formal gown, with a tiara and a sash with the words ‘Miss World Peace’ in English, Hebrew and Arabic, and armed with Israeli and Palestinian flags in each hand, I embarked on a ‘peace dialogue’ with ordinary people I encountered along the way.
My mission took me to Palestinian protests in Tel Aviv, to the Old City in Jerusalem, the Wailing Wall, markets and bus terminals where Israeli soldiers catch their buses back to their posts – some to the Palestinian front, some to other remote and isolated locations.
There was no way of telling whether the people I engaged with would go along with my self-appointed mission or if they would lay the harsh political truth on me. Despite the absurdity, I persisted and endured, questioned and encouraged in my quest for ‘Peace in the Middle East’.