Reflexivity, 2013

(still image from digital moving image)

Single-channel High Definition video
12 minutes, 19 seconds
16:9, colour, sound

Across Europe in the late 19th Century, people from ‘exotic’ places were put on display for photos/postcards in Völkerschau (Peoples Show/human zoos), including Samoan men and women bearing the tatau and malu (the Samoan male and female tattoos). Culture was reduced to an amusement, with individuals stripped of their humanity as they were exhibited as primitive oddities.

Although the Völkerschau have long since closed, the primary underlying motivations that drove spectators to these shows still exist in modern culture, which unwittingly reduces indigeneity to a spectacle of trinkets. This phenomenon nullifies the opportunity for meaningful exchange.

In Reflexivity, Angela Tiatia stands motionless at a pedestrian strip in Circular Quay, a popular tourist destination and home of the Cadigal people, traditional owners of inner-city Sydney. Tiatia holds her pose and the camera’s gaze to the soundtrack of the didgeridoo. Some people notice, some stop and look, some go behind the camera to take photographs for themselves, but many choose to not notice. Two men walk past and one says, “Go back home you dirty cunt!”

This work is an exploration of multiple gazes: the primary audience (the passers by); the secondary audience (the viewers of the work via the gallery); and finally the gaze of the artist. As such it is a recording of the circular relationship between cause and effect, where the act of observing affects the behavior of those being observed, and asks the question - who is being observed?

By presenting herself as the artist and the object, gender and racial tensions have been recorded, alongside hidden historical ties.

Reflexivity was filmed at Circular Quay, Sydney, Australia.