Co-commissioned by NOWNESS Asia and Institute of Modern Art, Now You’re Speakin My Language is a series of experimental moving image works exploring the ties between language and land.
For the series, Taungurung curator Kate ten Buuren has commissioned five artists of Australian First Nations, Southeast Asia, and Asia backgrounds.
Through explorations of memory, time, grief, migration, intergenerational knowledges, and more, the artists featured in the series mediate on how language and story connect us across oceans, rivers, lands and imposed borders, and time.
The films offer critical perspectives on ruptures and continuities in the colonial present, envisioning the many pasts and futures of the self and communities responding to ongoing violence and dispossession. They also imaginatively engage with intergenerational knowledge and memories, bringing forth languages inseparable from land.
NOWNESS Asia
Launched in 2020 as a sister-arm of NOWNESS, a movement for creative excellence in storytelling celebrating the extraordinary of every day. NOWNESS Aisa continues the platform’s commitment to cultural storytelling by playing close attention to regional zeitgeists, and by working closely with a new generation of creative practitioners to present stories for a contemporary global audience.
Institute of Modern Art
The Institute of Modern Art (IMA) champions contemporary art, artists, and ideas, connecting local voices to global dialogues through inclusive, sustainable, and innovative practice. Founded in 1975, the IMA is Australia’s oldest independent public art gallery.
Tiyan Baker
Tiyan Baker works in photography and video, sculpture and installation. She draws on historical research to trace unseen relationships between words, places, and stories. Centring her Bidayǔh culture in her works, she is interested in things she has unknowingly inherited. Living far from her native lands, culture, and family, in the midst of the recolonisation of Borneo, she explores all that can be mistranslated or lost and what can manifest in its place. Part salvaging and part speculating, her imaginative storytelling and world-building reclaims her indigenous heritage in the face of intergenerational shame and disadvantage, systematic destruction of culture, and geographical disconnection from kin. Born and raised on the Larrakia lands known as Darwin, she lives on the Awabakal and Worimi lands known as Newcastle, Australia.
Jenna Lee
Jenna Lee is a Gulumerridjin (Larrakia), Wardaman, and KarraJarri Saltwater woman of mixed Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, and Anglo-Australian ancestry. She works in photography and video, sculpture and installation, and body adornment to celebrate her overlapping identities. With a practice focused on ancestral material culture, she works with notions of the archive, histories of colonial collecting, and settler-colonial texts. She ritualistically analyses, deconstructs, and translates her sources, transforming them into new forms of cultural beauty and pride. Driven to create work in which she, her family, and the broader mixed First Nations community see themselves represented, she builds on a foundation of her father’s teachings of culture and her mother’s teachings of papercraft.
James Nguyen
James Nguyen works in Australia and Vietnam. His videos, installations, and actions offer a way to think more openly about the world. Ranging from the diasporic absurd to representational refusal, everything and anything is up for grabs. He has a PhD from UNSW (on broken translations), a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Sydney (on the cinematic body), a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Hons) from the National Art School, and a Bachelor of Pharmacy from Charles Sturt University. He was a collaborative fellow at UnionDocs (Centre for Documentary Arts, Brooklyn, New York). He shows locally and internationally.
Chi Tran
Chi Tran is a writer and filmmaker based in Naarm/Melbourne. She explores themes of everyday life and loss, with an emphasis on language and expression. Her lyrical and critical works blend fantasy, theory, and slow cinema, with stories focusing on the textures of human emotion, rooting the metaphysical in personal, physical experience. Combining a research-based approach to writing with a run-and-gun filmmaking method, she often inspired by real-life stories of her own and of those she lives with. Through world building and the manipulation of time, light, and language, she asks how useful the imaginary can be in forging new paths for relation and understanding.
Gutiŋarra Yunupiŋu
Gutiŋarra Yunupiŋu is a Gumatj man using new technologies to create contemporary expressions of timeless Yolŋu culture. His filmic self portraits created at the Mulka Project, a digital library and production centre located in Yirrkala in north-east Arnhem Land, explore his connection to Country. Born deaf, his work tests the possibilities of non-verbal communication in examining and representing self and culture.
Kate ten Buuren
Kate ten Buuren is a Taungurung curator, artist, and writer working on Kulin Country, who investigates collective and collaborative ways of working. Her interest in contemporary art, film, and oral traditions is grounded in self determination, self representation, and the power of knowing one another. She is the founder and active member of First Nations arts collective This Mob, who make space for young artists to connect and create on their own terms.