Gordon Hookey
Terraist
In this short yet poignant stop-motion animation, Waanji artist Gordon Hookey depicts an army of kangaroo cartoons, symbolic of Indigenous Australians, protesting outside Parliament House in Canberra. These humanised animals belong to the artist’s signature allegorical visual vocabulary, a kind of visual “guerrilla warfare”. However, this animation stands out within the artist’s decades-long practice largely devoted to mural painting and large canvases. Brandishing spears and sunglasses with the Aboriginal flag on their lenses, the kangaroos in Terraist appear launching a nuclear missile at the government building which later on erupts in a mushroom cloud of fungi. Often playing with puns, Hookey spells ‘terrorists’ as ‘terraists’, invoking the belief that Australian land was empty prior to British invasion (encapsulated in the concept of terra nullius), while simultaneously mocking the colonial language that robbed him of his own Waanji language. Given Aboriginal land rights remain contested, Terraist intends to disarm the hypocrisy of government policy, which continues to exploit Indigenous lands across Australia. This moving image stems from a drawing by Hookey which he laboriously erased and redrew unto to enable the stop motion effect. The sound of the piece is a hypnotic didgeridoo (Aboriginal musical instrument) soundscape.
Gordon Hookey belongs to the Waanyi people and locates his art at the interface where Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal cultures converge. He is one of Australia’s most radical voices, emblematic with his unapologetic image-making. His style and approach is distinctive in its vibrancy and best known for its biting satire of Australia’s political landscape and establishment, its leaders and representatives. His works make use of and inverts the language of propaganda, and has been at the forefront of unpacking the rage, fears, and angst of society. Hookey's work combines figurative characters, iconic symbols, bold comic-like text, and a spectrum of vibrant colours. Through this idiosyncratic visual language he has developed a unique and immediately recognisable style. The artist's perspective comes from a divergent, activist positioning – his work challenges hierarchies, skewering the status and integrity of the ‘elite’, while working to bolster the position of the marginalised and oppressed. Hookey is a core member of Brisbane-based Indigenous collective proppaNOW alongside fellow artists including Richard Bell, Vernon Ah Kee, and Jennifer Herd.