Richard Bell – An activist masquerading as an artist

Tuesday, October 22, 2024 at 7:30 p.m., SKC large hall
Belgrade, Kralja Milana 48
Cycle: Art and decolonization
Topic: Richard Bell – an activist disguised as an artist
Projections of photo and video documentation of works and their contextualization
Stevan Vuković guides you through the works of the artist

Richard Bell declares himself an activist masquerading as an artist. He is one of the founders of the group of aboriginal artists proppaNOW from Brisbane, where he lives permanently, and most often works within the framework of large international art manifestations, such as the Sydney Biennial (1992, 2008 and 2016), the Moscow Biennial (2013), the Jakarta Biennial (2015). and Documenta in Kassel (2022). His work entitled “Embassy”, which he presents as a public forum, with “artistic and diplomatic immunity”, is a nomadic space intended to discuss decolonization strategies. For example, when it was staged in New York, as part of the fifteenth Performa festival, the guests were members of the Black Lives Matter movement, Black Panthers and First Nations activists gathered around the Idle No More initiative.

In June of this year at the Tate Modern, as part of the Embassy project, Richard Bell held talks with Tian Zhang, the author of the Manifesto on Radical Care, filmmaker Subash Tebe Limbu, who bases his work on the Adivasi futurism of the indigenous Yaktung people, and Surab Padkeomm, an architect who works within of marginalized local communities, on the joint development of construction, sanitation and living space design skills. Bell’s Embassy is visually a replica, and symbolically a kind of living monument to the “Aboriginal Embassy”, which in 1972, in protest against the statement by then Prime Minister of Australia William McMahon declaring Aboriginal land rights invalid, Aboriginal activists Billy Craigie, Burt Williams, Gillar Michael Anderson and Tony Couri erected in front of the Australian Parliament and defended from the police in the protests that were generated around that installation.

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