EUGENIA LIM: My name is Eugenia Lim, and my practice is
working across video installation and performance.
I'm really interested in what it means to kind of exist in
this globalised kind of space that we live in today.
So, a lot of my work explores identities within the national context,
but also when we rub up against each other in globalisation.
I've been exploring, I guess, issues of labour and
ethics and what happens in the digital age as well for us humans.
Actually, it was probably paintings by Tom Roberts, like reproductions
in my family's home in suburban Melbourne.
I think I would have encountered them when I was like,
I don't know, when I can remember being like six years old
and seeing these paintings of colonial Australia, shearers,
like a kind of reality that seemed really different to my own.
And I think maybe from that point on, I started to kind of
think about how Australia is represented and the people that
live in Australia and the reality of my experience as a
second generation Australian being not really seen in the art
that I was looking at as a child.
So, I think from that point I just became a bit of a sponge,
just kind of looking around at media, trying to get to museums
and galleries when I could.
But it really took me a while.
I think that was like a formative moment 'cause sort of
seeing an art that was quite alien to me.
But I think it stuck with me as something that, you know,
I've been trying to work to expand through my practice
in the last few years.
How I feel when I make art or when I make, I guess, projects
is often anger and frustration.
It's often a way for me to work through big questions that I have
about social structures or inequities in our culture and our society.
As an artist who was born, you know, second generation Australian,
I guess my work has always been a way to figure out my place, which is one that is both
inside and outside, I'd say.
That idea of never quite belonging or fitting in.
It's sort of something that I can channel into my practice
and kind of work through for myself, but in a way that
hopefully can connect to audiences who might feel the same as well.
I make work that sits within the gallery context, but also in
public spaces and sites, specifically as well.
I'm really interested in taking my work to an audience.
So, that's why I kind of try and push it out, take it to
places where people are rather than maybe just catering to an
art audience as well.
I think I'm interested in illuminating questions that I have
about how to live in this kind of globalised neo-liberal
world in an ethical way and in a way that counters this kind
of extractive mode of being that we find ourselves in,
especially in Australia.
So, what I'm hopeful for, for the future of the arts is more
shared and distributed leadership and decision making.
I think we're in a really interesting time and a kind of
beautiful moment where first nations artists and voices are
really coming to the fore as they should be.
And ideas of like representation and determination being very
much a part of the conversation.
So, I'd like to see yeah, more, I guess, space and more
positions and more power for first nations artists, people of
colour, queer and non-binary people as well within the arts.
As co-director of an artistic company and also seeing,
you know, spaces like P.A.C.T as well with a new shared
leadership artistic director, I'm super hopeful that these
kinds of changes are kind of becoming embedded into the
organisations that we hold dear and that are kind of the
powerhouse of independent practice in this country.
So, I hope that we'll see more and more of this kind of
democratic leadership happening within the arts.
And my ultimate hope is that that trickles out and pushes out
beyond the arts, into politics, into sciences, into education.
Hopefully it spreads across the board 'cause I feel like we
really need those changes and it's really heartening to see
that they are happening in a small way.
And I hope that keeps building and gets bigger
and impossible to ignore.