like blood thirsty mosquitoes by Jack Green
like blood thirsty mosquitoes
The WTS collective warmly invites you to ‘like blood thirsty mosquitoes’ an exhibition curated by the WTS collective featuring Jack Green and Alana Hunt.
This exhibition highlights the colony’s obsessions with digging stuff up. Minerals from country, knowledge from people, power from relationships, to sustain life on stolen land.
Jack Green is an artist and activist born in the early 1950s under a Coolibah tree on Soudan Station on the Barkley Tablelands, Wakaya country. He is a Mambaliya man, Garrwa on his father’s side and Marra on his mother’s side. He grew up on cattle stations, travelling with kin for ceremonies, and settled in Borroloola in the early 1970s.
Jack first started painting as a powerful way to share his experiences of the operations and impacts of mining companies and government policy on the region’s peoples and their country; but has since gone on to explore a wide range of cultural and political themes.
“I want to show people what is happening to our country and to Aboriginal people. No one is listening to us. What we want. How we want to live. What we want in the future for our children. It’s for these reasons that I started to paint. I want government to listen to Aboriginal people. I want people in the cities to know what’s happening to us and our country. I want the government and mining companies to know that we are still here. We aren’t going anywhere. We aren’t dead yet. We are still here, feeling the country.”
'Alana Hunt makes art and writes and tries to find the most affective ways for this material to move in the world. Working over time across image, word, event, and relationship her work sensitively challenges dominant ideas and histories in the public sphere and in the social space between people.
Alana is a non-Indigenous person who has lived on Gija and Miriwoong Countries in north-west Australia for the last 12 years, and is currently based in Redfern on Gadigal Country. This, and her long-standing relationship with South Asia (and Kashmir in particular), shapes her examination of the violence that results from the fragility of nations and the aspirations and failures of colonial dreams.'
From 2020-23 Alana was an artist in residence with the Kimberley Land Council producing work about the WA Aboriginal Heritage Act (1972) via SPACED. In late 2023, Hunt completed Surveilling a Crime Scene (2023) a film that examines the materialisation of non-indigenous life on Miriwoong Country in the town of Kununurra and its surrounds.
Over the last 15 years Alana has worked in challenging yet sensitive ways within South Asia and on Miriwoong Country in the north-west of Australia. Her work is regularly shown nationally and internationally and she is the recipient of a number of awards, most recently the 2023 STILL: National Still Life Award judged by Max Delany at Yarrila Arts and Museum, Coffs Harbour. In April 2024 her work will be shown in a group exhibition at Printed Matter (New York) on publishing and resistance in South Asia and in 2024 is working from the Clothing Store Artist Studios at Carriageworks.
Curated by the WTS collective.