In an exhibition spanning two decades of his practice, Vernon Ah Kee interrogates racism, racial violence and whiteness, and Australia's history of wrong decisions.
About 10 to 15 years ago, Brisbane artist Vernon Ah Kee started noticing similarities between the treatment of refugee asylum seekers and Aboriginal First Nations people in Australia.
"[It was] when Australia's immigration policies … started to take a turn for the worse and started lurching into brutality," he"It was very clear that we were witnessing this process of arbitrary detainment and hopeless confinement again — after particularly in Queensland, we saw that over and over again in the reserves and mission systems [in the 20s and 30s]."
Members of Ah Kee's family were among the Indigenous Australians who were forcibly removed and relocated to a settlement on Palm Island as part of the broader system that flourished under the government's"protection laws". Ah Kee, an artist of Kuku Yalandji, Waanji, Yidinji, Koko Berrin and Gugu Yimithirr descent, says that Indigenous Australians and refugees share"a history of wrong decisions".
"There have been several times over the years where Australia, as a country, has had the opportunity to do the right thing and has always just turned around … and just said 'actually, no, I think we'll go the other way'.In 2018, Ah Kee drew that line by making a video work called The Island, currently showing as part of a career survey exhibition of the same name at Campbelltown Arts Centre in Western Sydney.
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