12Jul

17Jul

BLOOD RED | Greg Semu

Greg Semu

BLOOD RED

12 July – 17 September 2017

Cairns Art Gallery

Cairns
Queensland, Australia

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Exhibition Details

Greg Semu is an interdisciplinary artist of Samoan heritage who was born and raised in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. Semu’s first-hand experience of displacement has imbued him with empathy for other First Nations peoples.

BLOOD RED brings together a body of new, large-scale photographic works completed in Coen, a remote Indigenous community in Cape York, Far North Queensland. Working in consultation with Coen artist Naomi Hobson and traditional owners from the Coen region and in close collaboration with community elders, teachers, police, stockmen and actors, Semu and Hobson negotiated a dialogue with displaced peoples of Coen and beyond. His project renders tangible archival and remembered testimony of their experience as a chorus of silent injustice that challenges colonisers’ accounts of Australian history. Semu has worked like a filmmaker, zeroing in on, re-enacting and upscaling as gigantic photographs the brutal evidence of Coen’s frontier wars for the purpose of remembering the past and acknowledging present injustice and discrimination.

BLOOD RED is an initiative of the Cairns Art Gallery and is supported by Alcaston Gallery, Melbourne.

Cairns Art Gallery

40 Abbott St

Cairns City

QLD 4870

PO Box 7784, Cairns
Queensland, Australia

Image: GREG SEMU, Native Police Tracker Hut #02 COEN – Cape York 2017, 310 x 459 cm, self adhesive digital wall paper print © Greg Semu. Courtesy the artist and Alcaston Gallery, Melbourne.