Let’s Talk…The Arts with Christopher Bassi
This week on Let’s Talk…the Arts, Rachael catches up with Meriam & Yupungathi man Christopher Bassi to dig into the power of painting as a means to address critical questions of identity, history, sociology & the violent, persistent legacy of colonisation in Australia and the South Pacific. As an artist, Christopher’s work uses models of representational painting that parody traditional forms of colonial storytelling and mythmaking.
By appropriating these methods, his work creates “space for a type of speculative storytelling that considers questions of history and place and the entangling of personal and collective experience.”
In this rich conversation, Rachael and Christopher talk about the role of art in unsettling colonial myths: bringing to the surface the simmering tensions and contradictions, and making visible the violence that hovers just beneath the veneer of beauty.