 It's great to come to New York and talk to such a small crowd of people. I'm glad to be in this show, Global Feminism, because I didn't actually know how to spell feminism before this show, so it tells you a little bit something about me. I've walked, I'll travel through life as an Indigenous Australian. I'm actually from the Buccala people and come from the Wundana clan from an island called Fraser Island. So my take on Australia is a little bit different from the dominant culture. And this ad appeared in the Australian newspaper and I thought it would be nice to talk a little bit about history from an Indigenous perspective. The English came, unfortunately they never left. And this is our Prime Minister John Howard. And in Australia there have been huge discussions in relation to Aboriginal communities, Aboriginal populations because they tend to see it as a little bit problematic and a lot of the social issues that keep coming up. So my work really talks more about race than it does about gender. And I had an opportunity to live here in New York in 2004 and one of the first shows I went along to see was this exhibition curated at the International Photography Centre and it was called Only Skin Deep and the image on the right led me into a new body of work that I created here in 2004 and one of those images is currently in the exhibition. What struck me with the image on the right really was that this was a woman behind this mask and it said to me that not only men were involved in this racist construct but also women were equally involved and it meant that children were indoctrinated to think a certain way as well. And this is a documentary, it was a three-part series that was shown in Australia but it really talked about the science of how races constructed which fascinated me. In Australia we had a lot of measuring of Aboriginal skulls to prove that we were a part of the missing link and incorporated into Darwin's evolutionary theory but we never did prove them right. And so from that image that you just saw of that woman in the KKK I started to do a body of work that for me wanted to play in a humorous way to subvert dominant ways of thinking or a dominant construct that most Americans are pretty familiar with and it wasn't too difficult to play with some of that imagery so I started visualising the work and then I said about incorporating people into the projects I had to find African American models who wanted to be a part of the project, a seamstress, a photographer and the work came about over a four month period, it was shown here at the ISCP I think it's called and then it was shown in Australia in 2005 so it's sort of done around circle it's nice to come back to the States this year and have one of those images here in the show. When I was here researching for the project it was very easy to look up online KKK except these guys that I've done and made call the Hednistic Conquerators so they're just abbreviated to the HHH and the hoods and the fabric, all of the material comes from Harlem and this is the image that's in the show, some of the people are male, some of the people are female so I probably won't talk too long in relation to the work my talk's going to be really brief actually and when I went back to Australia the image on the right what's interesting is that this imagery still sort of circulates in different forms so the imagery on the right was on the front of the newspaper and it's actually the Australian Army Dressed Up as you can see here in pillowcases so it does have a resonance in Australia and what I want to say about Australia which people may not have an understanding of is that it is still actually a very racist country and so when I did show the work in Australia people were confronted in different ways whether they were Aboriginal friends or people of colour or the humour in the work but Anglo-Australians or White Australians were very confronted by their own feelings of guilt and racism and the work really is about playing with your emotions so it does take you on a little bit of a head spin because you're trying to work out where is it based, how is it grounded and the image on the left really came from the research that I was doing here and all I had to tap into a Google search was KKK and that was one of the images that easily came up and so for me when I showed the first image of the group it resonated in that way like these seven people standing and showing the work here in the States had a good feeling in a way because it was a way for me to engage with a community of people or people from a community who I may not have ever got to meet but I do travel overseas and do make a body of work I try and make a point of meeting people from that country and working with them so in 2001 I had a residency in Tampa, Florida and I got to meet Seminole people so I do try to go out as an artist and work with it work in different types of communities so I might just leave it there, thanks OK, let's do some questions Yeah, let's do that OK, any questions? Yep, the pillowcases that was just the... well obviously they were fooling around the pillowcases on the head, what was important is that they came from they were soldiers who worked for the Australian Army based in Townsville and they thought for their Christmas sort of get together that they would dress up in that way and that's why the costumes had that red with it so they're dressed up as Santa Clause supposedly with these hoods on you know, the way that I've been raised in Australia is as an Indigenous person so my take on life is very different from an Anglo-Saxon Australian so, you know, my take on race is different so I'm coming from a different perspective so when I do work overseas or in Australia some of the work is more based with race politics than gender politics Yeah The States has problems with the way that Blacks are being treated in Australia because they have a lot more freedom of support Do you know anything about that? Black soldiers coming to Australia from America were treated like second-class citizens, they weren't allowed to mix with the white soldiers as far as I'm aware in some documentaries I've seen so they were not allowed to go out and on leave as the white soldiers and I probably think that there was a fear that, you know Black soldiers would go out with white Australian girls so it was sort of like to curtail any of that