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SUMUGAN SIVANESAN
(Lives and works in Sydney, Australia and Berlin, Germany.)
Sumugan Sivanesan is an anti-disciplinary artist, researcher and writer, and a transcultural radical. His eclectic practice is concerned with the legacies of colonialism, the experience of cultural differences, and the diaspora. Often working collaboratively his interests span migrant histories and minority politics, activist media, artist infrastructures, more-than-human rights and multispecies politics, queer theory, Tamil diaspora studies and anticolonialism. In Berlin, he organizes with Black Earth, a collective who address interacting issues of race, gender, colonialism, and climate justice.
Sumugan earned a doctorate from the Transforming Cultures research center at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia (2014). He was a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute for English and American Studies (Cultural Studies), University of Potsdam (2016) supported by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) to research ‘Urban Eco-politics of the Anthropocene’, blogging at: shadowofthefuture.org. He has received grants from Kone Foundation, Finland (2019), Create New South Wales 360 Visions virtual reality development program (2017), Australia Council for the Arts Literature (2014), Australia Council for the Arts Emerging and Experimental Arts (2013), and Australia Council for the Arts Music Board (2008, 2005), among others.
Sivanesan’s first collaboration with MOMENTUM was during MOMENTUM Sydney in 2010, where he performed “What’s Eating Gilberto Gil” (2010), a performance-lecture exploring the history of cannibalism and its contemporary legacies. In February 2012, Sivanesan premiered his performance-lecture, “The Anticolonials”, tracing the past and present of anti-colonial politics, at MOMENTUM Berlin, in an exhibition also featuring a retrospective of Sivanesan’s video works. A Children’s Book of War, shown in this exhibition was subsequently gifted to the MOMENTUM Collection.
With the artist and writer Tessa Zettel he co-founded The T. Rudzinskaitė Memorial Amateur Lichenologists Society during a two-month residency at the Nida Art Colony to develop a work for its 2018 Inter-format Symposium ‘On Rites and Terrabytes.’ In November 2018 he was in residence at Instituto Procomun LABxS Santos, Brazil where he initiated Lunch Against Work: Almoço Contra o Trabalho, a social kitchen and laboratory for exchanging knowledge about plants, poverty, foraging, and food systems. Late in 2014, he undertook a two-month residency with the Faculty of Arts, University of Peradeniya, funded by the Australia Council for the Arts Literature (2014) and Arts NSW (2014). Here he initiated a critical writing and micro-publishing project, “Theoretically Tamil”.
Sumugan Sivanesan has produced events and exhibitions at: Nadine Laboratory for Conetmporary Arts (Brussels 2020); Akademie Schloss Solitude (2020); Tehai (Dhaka 2020); Frame Contemporary Art (Helsinki, 2019); The Floating University Berlin (2019); EX-EMBASSY (Berlin 2018); BE.BoP 2018: Black Europe Body Politics, Maxim Gorki Theatre (Berlin, 2018); Nida Art Colony Inter-format Symposium (Lithuania, 2018); Art Laboratory Berlin (2015); ZK/U Centre for Art and Urbanistics, Berlin (2015, 2014); Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (2014); The Reading Room (Bangkok 2013); Performance Space (Sydney 2013); MOMENTUM Berlin (2012); Yautepec Gallery (Mexico City 2011) and 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (Sydney 2011, 2010); MOMENTUM Sydney (2010). Sivanesan was a member of the experimental documentary collective theweathergroup_U who formed for the Biennale of Sydney 2008. He was active with media/art gang boat-people.org who engaged the Australian publics in issues of borders, race, and nationalism between 2002 and 2014.
A CHILDREN’S BOOK OF WAR
2010, Video, Animation, 1 min 45 sec
‘TERRA NULLUS’ AND THE PERMANENT STATE OF EXCEPTION
In March 2003, as Australia prepared to send troops into Iraq, two activists painted the words ‘No War’ on the Sydney Opera House.
But there was – and is – a war. After all, war is what makes the world go ‘round. War is an act of civilization. War and law go hand in hand. They govern each other so tightly that those who wage war often prefer not to call what they do ‘war’ to avoid having to abide by all the rules and conventions that have grown up around conflict.
Due to war or civil disorder or natural disaster we might find ourselves in situations where laws are suspended – in a ‘State of Emergency’. Like in Haiti after a major earthquake in January 2010 killed hundreds of thousands of people…
In Sri Lanka through more than 20 years of civil conflict…
And in Australia where the Northern Territory National Emergency Response was introduced in the lead up to a federal election.
Extreme circumstances can create a ‘State of Exception’ where the rule of law is put aside. Ever since September 11 when hijackers flew planes into New York’s Twin Towers, a State of Exception has justified a ‘War on Terror’. A war that includes the war in Iraq – the war that the Opera House activists made such a scene of objecting to – and the war in Afghanistan. A war not likely to end any time soon.
Teenage Riot
In February 2004, Aboriginal teenager, Thomas ‘TJ’ Hickey met a violent death, impaled on a fence behind a block of units in the Sydney suburb of Waterloo. He was last seen riding his bike at high speed from the neighboring suburb of Redfern. Two police vehicles were nearby.
From around the state mourners gathered in the community commonly known as ‘The Block’. That night, angry youth spilled out on Lawson Street. Throwing bottles and bricks at Redfern Station, they vented their frustration on state property and at the rows of riot police that had formed that afternoon in this ‘Space of Exception’.
In full view of the international media, their ‘riot’ unsettled the ‘relaxed and comfortable’ national image that Australia projects, revealing an unresolved legacy of colonial violence.
Bring the Troops Home
In 1901 the six colonies of Australia federated, and in 1915 they went to war. Prime Minister Billy Hughes declared that “Australia was born on the shores of Gallipoli” where more than 8,000 young Australians died fighting. But what about the war back home?
The War Memorial in Canberra enshrines the tomb of ‘The Unknown Soldier’ one of the nameless thousands who died fighting in a foreign theatre of war. To enter this shrine you must first pass through a courtyard enclosed by walls that feature a series of sculpted heads. Hung like hunting trophies, they depict the various animals the British settlers found when they came to this continent. Alongside the stairs that lead up to the shrine are the heads of an Aboriginal man and woman.
As you enter the tomb they display the geometry of power laid down by this foundational myth and are a startling reminder of the other Great War. After all, don’t these nameless heads represent the other ‘Unknown Soldiers’?
The War on ‘Terra’
When the British came to settle in 1788 they brought with them the idea of sovereignty, a European concept of authority by which they established their right to rule. Using the principle of ‘Terra Nullius’ – a land belonging to no one – they took possession of the land and water, failing to recognize the system of laws and land ownership already in existence.
An episode of popular Australian history involves the spearing of the first Governor of Sydney, Arthur Phillip, in 1790. A group of people had gathered to feast on a whale that had beached at Manly. Amongst them was the Eora man Bennelong. Not long before, Bennelong had been kidnapped into the British colony in an attempt to force diplomacy. It was a success as Phillip and Bennelong became friends, formally exchanging names. After some months ‘inside’ Bennelong slipped away, taking with him an understanding of the settlement and their ways.
When Phillip approached the gathering at Manly, Bennelong came forward and they exchanged pleasantries, they even toasted the King with wine the Governor had brought. Bennelong introduced Phillip to several others at the gathering including a man named Willemering, a carradhy1 invested with the power to deliver punishment according to Eora law. Willemering speared Phillip.
This spearing extracted a blood debt from Phillip as the head of the colony, for all the laws the settlers had broken. For establishing a permanent camp without permission, for the fish and game stolen, for the stolen weaponry and nets, for the random shooting of natives, for the curse of smallpox, for the mysterious genital infections of women and then of their men.2 This metering of justice brought the British into Eora law.
1 A carradhy is a ‘clever man’
2 Keneally, Thomas. The Commonwealth of Thieves – The Sydney Experiment.
Random House Australia, 2005. p 304.
End Game
In Cabinet 96 in the Enlightenment Gallery of the British Museum, there is a shield. It is titled ‘bark shield’ and its description reads:
“The bark shield below was one of the first Australian objects to arrive in Britain.
In April 1770 Captain Cook and his officers attempted to land on Australia’s southeast coast. When two men of the Eora tribe tried to stop the landing, one was wounded by gunfire and dropped his shield. First contacts in the Pacific were often tense and violent.” 3
When Captain Cook first made contact, 18 years before Governor Phillip and the First Fleet arrived an act of violence pre-empted the war that was to follow.
It’s a war that a lack of recognition of Indigenous Sovereignty helps to perpetuate.
A war that the civic revolt at Redfern revealed. A war not likely to end any time soon.
3 Schlunke, Katrina. “Home”. South Atlantic Quarterly vol.108 (1), Winter 2009 pp 1–25.
A Children’s Book of War made its fortuitous entrance into the MOMENTUM Collection while curator Rachel Rits-Volloch was in the process of organizing Sivanesan’s exhibition at MOMENTUM in 2012, The Anticolonials. After spending the day with Sivanesan reviewing his videos, Rits-Volloch asked him to play a neglected yellow icon on his desktop. While Sivanesan insisted that the work was merely a short animation, quite different from his other works, Rits-Volloch immediately registered the impact of the work.
The short animation A Children’s Book of War, packed with seemingly cheerful imagery and low-tech video game aesthetics, is not at all what it initially appears. Packed into this concise video collage are images comingling diverse icons of popular culture with references to centuries of colonial conflicts underlying the foundation myths of Australian nationhood. The power of A Children’s Book of War lies in its jarring conjunction of war, sovereignty, and violence with a format usually reserved for much more lighthearted topics. With its bright color palette and amusing soundscape, this video incorporates iconography as diverse as Julian Assange, the Sydney Opera House, and the frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan.
In the accompanying text to the work, Sivanesan draws upon Giorgio Agamben’s notion of the “state of exception” to discuss 9/11, Australia entering the Iraq War in 2003, the 2010 Haiti earthquake, and the first fateful contact that Captain Cook made in Australia. The “state of exception,” in short, is the temporary suspension of the rule of law in the name of a greater force – whether that be a defense against insurrectionary forces or the preservation of the very constitution of a sovereignty. With its haunting last paragraph, Sivanesan reminds us that the sovereignty of Australia rests on the suspension of indigenous rights – indeed, that everywhere in the Western world our lives are made possible by suspensions that are felt and suffered always elsewhere:
“When Captain Cook first made contact, 18 years before Governor Phillip and the First Fleet arrived an act of violence pre–empted the war that was to follow. It’s a war that a lack of recognition of Indigenous Sovereignty helps to perpetuate. A war that the civic revolt at Redfern revealed. A war not likely to end any time soon.”
[Jenny Tang]