MELBOURNE, Australia – “It’s a shame you can’t imagine beyond your silly little flag,” a soft voice sings against a cosmic backdrop. As the hypnotic background music picks up speed and gently reverberates, the space carriers head towards an unseen horizon above the snow-capped peaks of Mount Everest. This is part of the work of artist Yakthung Subash Thebe Limbu in Okkoota ಒಕ್ಕೂಟ, a group exhibition curated by Bangalore Dalit artist Vishal Kumaraswamy, and part of an ongoing collaboration between Kumaraswamy and the arts institution Melbourne Arts House. Meaning “gathering” in Kannada, Okkoota ಒಕ್ಕೂಟ was comprised of works by 12 artists residing in Australia and South Asia that highlight the atrocities of caste-based discrimination and make a collective statement against colonial power. Highlights included the haunting tableau of Phuong Ngo’s Vietnamese displacement, as empty hammocks sway next to enlarged photographs of refugee children, Shareeka Helaluddin’s immersive soundscape in the venue’s clock tower, and the mourning by Moonis Ahmad for the Disappearance, in which an automated, paperless typewriter typed out the names of undocumented people, as well as the Limbu sci-fi documentary mentioned above Ningwasum (2021).
But it is difficult to distinguish the “best” work from a show highlighting the notions of collectivism and decoloniality. Like the structures that underpin colonial capitalist power around the world, the works of art were intertwined; you just had to figure it all out and connect the dots. Although a term like “decoloniality” may now sound like an empty signifier in the art world, Okkoota ಒಕ್ಕೂಟ refused to conceptualize the show as an academic object lesson. Nor did it co-opt the politics of decoloniality to aestheticize them. Any skepticism was dispelled upon entry, when visitors realized that the entire Arts House, which is known for its performance and resides in the austere North Melbourne Town Hall, had been adapted to suit the show, instead of the other way around.
A sense of directness emanated from each work. In the vestibule, on the right wall and on two columns, was Rahee Punyashloka’s ‘protagonist context’, made up of bold black decals proclaiming the marginalization of Dalits. Look down and you’ll notice Lara Chamas’ diptych, its parts titled “Grenade and Other Ordnance” and “Tools He Made, for My Mama to Feed Us” (both 2021), blurring the line between objects simple and weapons of war. A black curtain led to another room; as visitors walked through the dark space in surprising corners, the main performance space of Arts House transformed into a kind of maze. At times, the works literally spoke to each other, as when Shah’s piece slammed against the distorted sounds of Punyashloka’s affecting ‘Tannerfilm#1’ (2023) upstairs. It wasn’t necessarily harmonious, that was the goal.
Establishing a common point between fundamentalist Hindu India and Australia, a colony of settlers, is not at all far-fetched. From there, one can think of Israel, the United States, South Africa, China, Singapore, etc. Indigenous and Dalit peoples everywhere have suffered countless depredations, recorded and unrecorded. In Australia, a paranoid nation-state still largely ravaged by inward-looking parochial behavior, Okkoota ಒಕ್ಕೂಟ refreshingly encouraged a globalist view of indigeneity – despite varying contexts and circumstances, power structures and impoverishment are similar. And it is only through this recognition that we can truly work towards a policy without borders. It recalls what the author of the anti-caste urtext caste annihilationDr BR Ambedkar, once wrote: “This spirit of self-interest is as much a marked characteristic of different castes in their isolation from one another as of nations in their isolation.”
