Cirrus

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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Black Is The New White is Nakkiah Lui’s romantic comedy commissioned by the Sydney Theatre Company for the May/June 2017 season. It milks laughs from a stereotypical narrative of a privileged young black woman bringing her inappropriate boyfriend home to meet her parents. The twist— although not much of one these days—is that the boyfriend is white. Black Is The New White is also the name of the 2007 autobiography by African American comic genius Paul Mooney. We can reach further back to the early 1990s: to Gordon Bennett’s sweet watercolours of black angels and his more ghoulish messenger between worlds, the large scarified Altered Body Print (Shadow Figure Howling at the Moon) (1994) with its mashed binaries and grotesque white/black, male/female, human/ animal totemic‑like monster. Before Bennett there was Tracey Moffatt’s sweet black angel Jimmy Little on the royal telephone to heaven, an ironic serenade to her grim horror film, Night Cries (1989), which unsettled normative understandings of black/ white relations with chilling effect.' (Introduction)

Notes

Epigraph: Seemingly fixed discourse positions are … mixed up. Black becomes white – white becomes black. Thomas Reinhardt on Kader Attia’s exhibition Repair. 5 Acts.

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y Artlink vol. 37 no. 2 1 June 2017 11313695 2017 periodical issue Abstract
'Welcome to the “trans” issue as it is cryptically called (meaning across and beyond in Latin). The aim of this issue is transnational as much as transcultural: to explore relations between Indigenous contemporary artists across the world. So focused are we on the Australian context for Indigenous art that when it comes to aligning ourselves with international art, in both historic and contemporary contexts, we too often deprive ourselves of that defining peer‑to‑peer agency that permits new perspectives. When we step outside of this internal viewpoint to project ourselves internationally, as in the occasion of the representation of two high‑profile Indigenous artists in the national pavilions of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand for the 57th Venice Biennale, this rite of passage clearly becomes apparent. It is one well‑served by Tracey Moffatt and Lisa Reihana, whose elegant visual narratives demonstrate a form of this trans‑aesthetic, appropriate to taking on Europe and the world.' (Editorial introduction)
2017
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2017
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pg. 28-34