An Introduction to Monuments

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Fine Print

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For MONUMENTS, fine print has commissioned a series of written and oral works that respond to the concept of memorialisation. Reflecting on the curatorial research of Lisa Radford and Yhonnie Scarce’s The image is not nothing (Concrete Archives); an international research-based project and exhibition shown at ACE Open (SA) and across the Margaret Lawrence Gallery and the Living Museum of the West (Vic), MONUMENTS expands the act of transcription to include story-telling and the formation of memory.

From the toppling of governments and reclaiming of disaster-stricken land to ongoing debates of contested objects, buildings, landscapes, monuments play a fundamental role in mobilising and re-articulating struggles in identification. Inherent to these ‘objects’ are wider processes and structures of memorialisation that manifest social configurations.

Through a series of spatial interventions a group of artists responded to a series of works that sat in absentia to the exhibition. Once performed in the space—in relation to other works and audience members —these works absorbed and projected new meaning and discourse.

New imaginings and spatialisations can foster unique moments of shared learning and understanding. The missing singular ‘object’ or ‘artwork’ takes on a new collective form shared by the public brought together in a moment of openness. Roland Barthes activated the term ‘counter-memory’ in the 80s to evoke the amnesiac quality of photographs and their capacity to ‘counter’ memory—an act of remembrance. It is considered (and perhaps exemplified or reimagined here) as a concept for re-thinking time giving agency to political subjectification whilst refusing nationalist-normativity of remembrance forged in monuments and canonised histories. Counter-memory, both as concept and method, is an attempt to forge temporalities attuned to the social movements and struggles of the overcome.

The outcomes of these works are expansive conversations around the structures and language we use for representations of power, grief and sites of trauma. What we find is that memorialisation—how we observe the past—can never be fully untangled from how we form habits in the present. These transformations from representation to post-politics and post-ideology embody new passages from internationalism to multiculturalism, antiglobalisation and artistic production that render the invisible, visible. These new forms of memorialisation and counter-memory re-claim truer forms of reality, or self-organisation within transient communities, whilst imagining new forms of communal organisation, social engagement, and purposeful art.

Contributing artists include: Lur Alghurabi (SA), Eric Avery (NSW), Dominic Guerrera (SA), Rosie Isaac (Vic), Melanie Pryor (SA), Autumn Royal (SA), Iran Sanadzadeh (SA), Marlee Silva (NSW), Chim↑Pom (JPN), Tadasu Takamine (JPN), and Marcus Whale (NSW).

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