PHOTO LIVE with Paola Balla and Tashara Roberts

23.7.20

Paola Balla (Wemba Wemba, Gunditjmara) and Tashara Roberts Art (Dja Dja Wurrung, Yorta Yorta) spoke together on Thursday 23 July about truth in the context of place, ancestral identity, cultural pride and their work in Affirmation, an exhibition at Koorie Heritage Trust.

PAOLA BALLA
Paola is a Wemba-Wemba & Gunditjmara woman & is a visual artist, curator, writer, lecturer & PhD candidate who lectures with Moondani Balluk Indigenous Academic Centre at Victoria University. Paola is a Lisa Bellear Post Graduate Research Scholar. Her art & research focuses on black women’s art & activism & it’s role in disrupting patriarchal & colonial dominant narratives & spaces. She curated Executed in Franklin Street (2016) City Gallery, co-curated Sovereignty (2016) & Unfinished Business; Perspectives on art and feminism (2017) at ACCA. Her writing appears in, Oceania, The Lifted Brow, Art Link, Writers Victoria, Freize (UK), SBS & NITV. She is a member of the Blak Brow Collectivewho edited the Blak Brow (2018) for The Lifted Brow.

Paola utilises photography as sovereign act, in both process and outcome for expressing blak matriarchy & First Nations ways of ‘being, knowing and doing.’

TASHARA ROBERTS
Tashara Roberts is a contemporary Indigenous conceptual artist based in Bendigo and is a Dja Dja Wurrung/Yorta Yorta woman. Tashara works as an Indigenous photo-media artist, whose practice includes photography, moving image, installation, mixed media, painting, sculpture and jewellery. She has completed a certificate in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Cultural Art and a Bachelor of Creative Arts. Her work is sometimes subversive and politically charged; she uses visual culture to explore cultural and societal issues. Her multi-disciplinary practice often explores her Aboriginal heritage and/or shows the viewer what it is like looking at the world through her eyes.

If you have difficulty viewing the video on this webpage, it can also be viewed on Facebook.

Founding Partners
  • Bowness Family Foundation
  • Naomi Milgrom Foundation
Major Government Partners
  • City of Melbourne Arts Grants Program
  • Creative Victoria
Major Partners
  • Maddocks

PHOTO Australia respectfully acknowledges the traditional custodians of the lands upon which we work and live, and the rich and diverse Indigenous cultures across what is now called Australia. For over 60,000 years, Indigenous arts and culture have thrived on this sacred land, and we honour Elders and cultural leaders past and present. This was, and always will be, Aboriginal land.

01–24 March