Art, Identity, and Place

In her recent exhibition Re-Orient: Reclaiming Spaces, Redefining Stories, Chinese-Italian Australian artist Pia Johnson examined the rich and emotional territory of identity, and questioned how site and place can shift our sense of belonging across time.  

Pia used the 19th century Customs House – where new arrivals had their baggage and papers checked and where the infamous Dictation Test was administered – as a site-specific location to explore how we understand our collective transnational communities and histories.

The exhibition featured Pia ‘re-orienting’ herself through the grand physical spaces of the Immigration Museum, its collections, and the architecture that once spoke strongly to new immigrants about who could, and could not, belong. Her series of self-portraits encouraged trans-cultural artists to seek out the places that once, by design, made their ancestors ‘not feel welcome’.

This panel conversation, hosted by Museums Victoria's Dr Moya McFadzean and featuring creative practitioners Dr Pia Johnson, Dr Torika Bolatagici and Sophia Cai, uses  Re-Orient as a launching pad to explore questions about how archives, architecture and forms of creative practice can be utilised to articulate new narratives within today’s cultural landscape.

Panellists

Pia Johnson

Pia Johnson is a photographer, visual artist, curator, and lecturer, who has exhibited across Australia and internationally, and is collected in private and public collections including the National Gallery of Victoria. Her work has been a finalist in many photography awards including the National Photographic Portrait Prize, Olive Cotton Award, Bowness Photography Prize, Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize, Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award among others.

Pia holds a Bachelor of Creative Arts from University of Melbourne and has a Doctorate in Fine Arts from RMIT University.

Sophia Cai

Sophia Cai is a curator and writer based in Naarm / Melbourne, Australia. She is the current Artistic Director of Bus Projects, one of Australia’s longest running artist-run organisations, while maintaining an independent curating and writing practice. From 2020 to 2023, she taught as a lecturer at the Victorian College of Arts, University of Melbourne and Monash Art Design & Architecture, Monash University.

Sophia’s research interests include Asian art histories and the intersections between contemporary art and craft. Since 2020, Sophia has been researching the connection between fandom and curating as dual practices rooted in care.

Torika Bolatagici

Dr. Torika Bolatagici is an artist, writer and academic working in photography, video, installation, publication, and curation. Her work explores transcultural notions of value and the social, cultural, and political movement of bodies. Torika’s multidisciplinary projects centre the counter-narrative of marginalised histories and knowledges.

Her curatorial collaborations, symposia, and public programming include the Contemporary Pacific Arts Festival Symposium, the Pacific Photobook Project, and the Community Reading Room. She is also the Program Manager for the Master of Fine Arts (Coursework) in the School of Art at RMIT University.

Host

Moya McFadzean

Dr. Moya McFadzean is Senior Curator (Migration & Cultural Diversity) at Museums Victoria. Her work focuses on the application of material culture and memory of migration and cultural diversity to interpretations of Australian migration, refugee, and asylum seeker narratives. Her research also looks at museums as sites of social activism and their potential for developing relationships of genuine engagement and reciprocity with communities and creatives.

Moya has widely published and presented on these subjects in national and international forums and was also part of the team that collaborated with Pia Johnson to produce the Re-Orient exhibition.