Genevieve GRIEVES
Desire
2006
video projection

The panel, Desire, comes from an installation I developed in 2005 while a Creative Fellow at the State Library of Victoria. Picturing the Old People explores nineteenth century photography of Indigenous people of south eastern Australia (Koories) - particularly some of the extraordinary staged and constructed images created by white photographers. I was intrigued by these images and by the cultural environment in which they flourished. There was a huge commercial and scientific fascination with the exotic globally: these collections of our ancestors being one example.

Desire came to me before I began my research and stayed with me through the entire process without change. It is partly a homage to the many Indigenous women I discovered in the archives represented as objects of desire for a white audience. It is also a statement about sexual relationships on the frontier in Australia and grief experienced by Indigenous men in its wake.

I decided on video as a medium for this work as I wanted to try and bring an aspect of history alive; re-animating images that have represented "Aboriginality" and tell alternate stories behind their creation. This work was collaborative in that many people - cast and crew - contributed to its production.