Tom Nicholson

Comparative Monument (Palestine)

2012

Comparative Monument (Palestine), 2012

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Tom Nicholson’s Comparative Monument (Palestine) engages a peculiar Australian monumental tradition: war monuments that bear the name “Palestine”. Countless of these monuments were built immediately after World War 1 to commemorate the presence of Australian troops in Palestine. The Australian troops had entered Palestine in 1917 after fighting the Turks threatening the Suez Canal with the British, when the main focus was on the European fronts rather than on the Middle East campaign. Scattered all over Australia, these monuments also reflect the realities of the 1920s (when they were erected) during the era of the British mandate, when the name Palestine implicitly invoked the shared position of Australia and Palestine within British imperialism.

Comparative Monument (Palestine) takes the form of nice stacks of posters for visitors to take away. Each poster is a proposal for a new monument bearing the name “Palestine” in and around Melbourne. Re-animating these linkages between Australia and Palestine, the posters implicate the events and repercussions of 1948 Palestine war till today, along with their echoes of Australian Aboriginal experiences of dispossession and colonial violence.

Each poster features different forms such as pavilions, rotundas, obelisks, cenotaphs, and elevated statues of Australian soldiers. The stacks never exceed knee height. Visitors are encouraged to remove posters and display them elsewhere, in the process partially privatizing and diluting this particular memory with other, unknown, memories.

Comparative Monument (Palestine) attempts to rethink the possibilities of the monument in the face of Australia’s histories of dispossession, and the acts of imagination and solidarity these histories demand. The work also deploys printed matter to generate ephemeral public actions, in particular through processes of distribution that generate a field of dispersed social encounters.

Tom Nicholson is trained in drawing, a medium which he has used to think about the relationships between public actions and their traces, between propositions and monuments, and between writing and images. He has made a number of works engaging aspects of Australia’s colonial history, using combinations of drawings, monumental forms, and posters, often articulating these histories in relation to the histories of other places. His work is often nourished by his disciplinary training in drawing, and particularly drawing’s character as a prospective form, or a process dedicated to meditating upon forms that are yet-to-be. Works like Comparative Monument (Palestine) (2012) and Unfinished Monument to Batman’s Treaty (2011) deploy printed matter to generate ephemeral public actions, in particular through processes of distribution that generate a field of dispersed social encounters.

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Tom Nicholson Comparative Monument (Palestine)

Tom Nicholson

Comparative Monument (Palestine)