Objects testify is a community-engaged program exploring the colonial legacies of Australia's built environment and its ongoing impact on First Nations communities, led by Wiradjuri anti-disciplinary artist Joel Sherwood Spring.
The exhibition includes Joel Sherwood Spring’s DIGGERMODE (2022), a video work that questions the social and environmental ethics of technology in constructing, storing and sharing images, whether in surveillance databases, museum archives or online. The work considers the problems arising from new technologies that provide open access to cultural belongings and documentation of Indigenous peoples.
As both a standalone video work and a philosophy of enquiry, DIGGERMODE highlights the environmental impact of our digital world on Indigenous peoples who most intimately feel the growing impacts of capitalism and climate change on their lands and ways of being.
Objects testify provokes an understanding of architecture as not just the built environment, but the digital and social technologies that propel the conditions of extraction from the mine to the materiality of social life. Sherwood Spring articulates ‘digging’ as the foremost colonial technique that makes all other colonial forms of exploitation possible.
Included in the exhibition are loaned objects from public and private collections which illustrate the technologies of extraction and the ideologies that propel extractive practices. A program of closed and public conversations between First Nations community, scholars, artists, architects, and designers articulates the wider discourses of DIGGERMODE and consider the possibility of new forms of testimony.
About the artist
Joel Sherwood Spring is a Wiradjuri anti-disciplinary artist, writer and broadcaster, who works collaboratively on projects that sit outside established discourses of contemporary art, architecture and power.
His discursive and spatial practice examines the contested narratives of Australia’s urban cultural and Indigenous history in the face of ongoing colonisation. Spring is a Co-Director of Future Method Studio, a collaborative and interdisciplinary practice working across architecture, installation and speculative projects. In 2021, he guest edited Runway Journal’s 44th issue TIME and was a commissioned artist for Ceremony, the 4th National Indigenous Art Triennial, 2022 at the National Gallery of Australia, curated by Hetti Perkins.
Exhibition publication
Objects testify was accompanied by a publication with a text by the artist.
Design by Daryl Prondoso
Related press
'Diggermode: A Conversation'
Sebastian Henry-Jones in conversation with Joel Sherwood Spring.