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March 22, 2007
Fiona Omeenyo is part of the Lockhart River Gang, and her work explores family relationships – those who are alive and those who are dead. Is there a haunting by ghosts and a politics of memory in play here in these paintings?
My interpretation of some of Fiona Omeenyo recent paintings is that we have the ghostly echo (or traces) of an ancient "nomadic mode of life 'drifting' through an violent economic flows of modernity. The images can be interpreted as a hauntology that remembers the suffering of the Indigenous people though their stories that are passed down.
This isn't about the return of the past, it is about us living in a time when the past is present, and the present is saturated with the past; and the past shapes future possibilities.
Fiona Omeenyo, My painting, 2001, synthetic polymer paint on canvas
Fiona Omeenyo says:
My works are about country and stories passed onto me by my family. i like to paint about those stories ... good to understand ... so I can tell my kids about those story places and why they are important to our family. Sometimes when I'm bored ... I do my best paintings .. the feeling inside of me ... I don't know how to explain it ... i just let that painting take a hold of my hand ... just put the paintbrush on the canvas and start painting away. And when I'm painting I feel happy ... just like someone's standing next to me watching what I'm doing ... makes me feel strong.
The image speak to a history of Australia beneath the surface, away from the standard 'end of history' narrative we've learned on our mothers knees; speaks to another, alternative history that we struggle to articulate intelligibly how this spectre is haunting Australia.
Omeenyo's 'My painting' is not spooky, but we are not made comfortable either. We sense the presence of spectres on the edges on the art institutions, and we become aware that the image offers an alternative to modernism's linear history, or postmodernism's permanent revival of past styles. This history is about the time being out of joint; there is some temporal disjunction here that we cannot quite put our finger on; we suspect that it is a space where the precondition for our being is the killing, abduction, and rape of your ancestors; or their forcible removal from their own lands? The ghosts always return. In hauntology, we engage with the ghosts, resurrect them, commit ourselves to a response to the many voices of the past.
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UIpdate: 24 March
I forgot to mention that hauntology, as K-Punk points out has its roots in Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx. This update is cross posted from philosophical conversations. The ghosts dealt with in this text pertain to, at the very least, those ghosts of Marx that haunt us (as in chapter 3, “Wears and Tears”), and those that haunted Marx (those he confronted, was obsessed with, and afraid of, as in chapter 4, “In the Name of the Revolution, the Double Barricade”).
In dealing with these different levels of ghosts and hauntings Derrida treats two fundamental questions: 1) whither Marxism?, that is, where is it going? and is it dying?, and 2) how is time out of joint and what kind of response does this call for? These questions come together in an affirmation of a certain type of “learning to live” as seen in the
exordium (xii-xx). Derrida urges the reader to learn to live together-with, together with ghosts, and together with others rather than repress history. In recognizing a debt–a debt to Marx and his specters–Derrida signals a “politics of memory” and the necessity to reckon with, and work with our past, our ghosts, and our inheritance.
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This will and always remain a great painting regardless of your Stupid words that introduced it.