BLAZE XI @ CCAS (2017)

Just off the central axis of CCAS’ MIDDLEspace is The Uberigine’s installation and performance piece The Awkward Space. A self-proclaimed ‘post modern indigenous absurdist’, The Uberigine will present a lecture on the opening evening of BLAZE XI alongside her installation that includes note books, pens and a vanity mirror enclosed in a circle of black ribbons. During her lecture, the polite and effervescent Uberigine will introduce her concept of ‘the awkward space’. Capitalising on contemporary art’s readiness for ‘anything goes’, The Uberigine will invite awkwardness, highlighting her own as well as asking for your contributions. The work is both genuinely generous and deliberately destabilising, a strategic position The Uberigine adopts not only in her art but also everyday as a Mandandanji, Bidjara and Mithaka woman unavoidably confronting the colonial structures of privilege and denial that permeate contemporary Australia. In fact, it is difficult to discern where the act ends and real life begins. Through The Awkward Space, The Uberigine calls attention to a particularly common, but often unnoticed privilege: where some Australians may be able to casually enter any space, system or structure, many Indigenous Australians are regularly questioned (openly or furtively) of their right to be present, to speak, to belong. Staying with the trouble, The Awkward Space is an elegant illustration of this privilege. Significantly, the work also generates a space where we might, if awkwardly, acknowledge and find ways to redress this and other systemic imbalances that deny equal rights.