Design and Art Australia Online

*Raymond Zada *
Raymond Zada is an Indigenous artist working primarily in photography, video and digital design. His works reflect on contemporary attitudes towards and language used about Aboriginal people.

Raymond Zada was born in North Adelaide in 1971 and raised in Maree and Port Augusta. He has lived in Adelaide since he was 19. Raymond’s heritage is Barkindji/Paakintji/Afghan from his father’s side and Scottish from his mother’s.

As a 10 year old Raymond started creating animations on his Commodore Vic 20 computer which he would synchronise to music on his cassette player. Self-taught, he continues to work as a software developer. He has worked in radio broadcasting in presenting, producing and in technical roles. In 2010, Raymond was a writer, producer and performer in OutBlak Adventures, which won a Ruby Award for Community Impact.

Working for the health and social well-being of Aboriginal same-sex attracted people is also an important part of Raymond’s life. He has been active in establishing Mooolagoo Mob, an Adelaide based social and support network for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders who identify as same sex attracted.
Raymond takes the symbols and logos that we see many times a day, places them in a different context or juxtaposes them with images or words to hold a mirror up to us of the attitudes and marginalisation that underpin Australian society. The broad themes of his work include recording and documentation, acknowledgement of Aboriginal history, hypocrisy and tokenism, racism and homophobia. His works tend not to shout his themes. Rather he aims to draw the audience in, often with humour, before they put their filters up. Once the attention is caught, the nature and complexity of the work becomes apparent.

Raymond entered the art world in 2012 when his entry racebook won the works on paper prize in the 2012 Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award. He acknowledges the significance of winning this prize in giving him the confidence to continue developing and exhibiting works.

racebook is a large, text based work in which Raymond has formatted the actual comments posted on two Aboriginal-hate Facebook sites. The comments, printed in small white font on a blue ground are formatted so the negative space spells racebook in the distinctive Facebook font and colour. He has placed a small thumbs down ‘too many people like this’ in the lower corner. Knowing the Facebook posts would be quickly removed (only for their equivalent to as quickly emerge on another page and that for some having a post removed would be a badge of honour) Raymond saved the comments, wanting to record the fact of their existence. The sites had over 40,000 likes before they were taken down. For him, it is not about Facebook or social media per se. The significance is that these comments show what is in people’s minds and that this needs to be understood to progress. The comments underlie the less overt racism that Indigenous people deal with daily. His work is both documentation and commentary.

In 2013 Zada’s video ‘Sorry’ won the Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander New Media Art Award. The work intersperses the words of two Prime Ministers’ speeches on Australia’s treatment of Aboriginal people, Paul Keating’s Redfern Address (1992) and 16 years later Kevin Rudd’s 2008 apology to Aboriginal people. It highlights that one speech acknowledges past actions, recognises the dispossession, murders and discrimination, but there is no apology. The other apologises for the pain and indignity inflicted, and acknowledges the stolen generation but nothing else. Both see Australia as about to ‘turn a new page’. Zada’s ‘Sorry’ highlights the hypocrisy and inadequacy of this word.

Responding to the widely held preconceptions about what an Aboriginal person looks like and the expectations that arise from that. At Face Value is a video of 25 photographic portraits of Aboriginal people where each morphs into the next person. He challenges the viewer to accept at face value that this diverse looking group are all Aboriginal and for Aboriginal people to think about what it would be like to have a different skin or eye colour.

Having established himself as a digital media artist, Zada is extending into other media.
‘Acknowledged’ (2014) is an installation comprising video, Kaurna soil, laser cut stainless steel. Raymond was interested in creating a work dealing with the absence of recognition of the Kaurna people, the original inhabitants of the land on which Adelaide lies. When researching, he observed that signs on every street corner recognise a person, rather than a place. All but one acknowledges non-Aboriginal inhabitants. The exception was Victoria Square, aka Tarndanyangga, its Kaurna name, the first place the Aboriginal flag was flown in Australia. The video is of Tarndanyangga, the acknowledgment to country is in the foreground and hundreds of street signs with the name of every street in Adelaide stream out of the image towards the viewer, illustrating the predominance of white history and absence of acknowledgement of tens of thousands of years of Kaurna history. Zada placed an engraving of the layout of Adelaide’s street in front of the video and on top of soil – Kaurna earth – collected from beside the River Torrens to symbolise how thin is the veneer of white history that overlays the ancient Kaurna history. He originally saw this work as particular to Adelaide, but has since observed that this is a feature of most towns and cities in Australia. He notes the tokenism in co-naming the square Tarndanyangga. Tarndanyangga was the meeting place for Kaurna people. In recent times the square was a place where Aboriginal people gathered and drank. Once they were moved on, the place gained recognition as an important Aboriginal meeting place.
Zada’s art work provides him the opportunity to make a statement about issues that are important to him. His art allows him to make statements without having to be constrained by the expectations of others. Although his works address disenfranchisement, discrimination, homophobia and racism, the tone of his work is factual. His works aim to draw people in, with the hope that they will educate, inform and get people thinking a little differently.

In 2015 Zada participated in the annual Indigenous print workshop at Cicada Press at UNSW College of Fine Arts. He produced his first etchings, ‘Rowley’s line’ and ‘Sorry’. This was his first experience of producing art with others. In 2017 he returned to Cicada press to make his first non-digital works – hand drawn etchings and screen prints, done in a cartoon-like structure of three squares. These seem to refer back to his very early interest in animation. Their style and format gives the initial impression that these are light-hearted images. Instead they reflect on the Intervention, the absence of Aboriginal people on the bus and in ordinary life and the predominance of Aboriginal people in prison.
Zada’s works have been included in Defying Empire, 3rd National Indigenous Art Triennial, National Gallery of Australia (2017), Experimenta Recharge, 6th International Biennial of Media Art, National Tour (2016), The Collections Project – Off the Grid, Art Gallery of South Australia, a collaboration between Guildhouse & History SA (2015), Tarnanthi, Inaugural Festival of Contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art, Restricted, National Aboriginal Cultural Institute, Tandanya (2013) and Picture this, Counihan Gallery, Brunswick, Melbourne, Victoria (2012).

His work is included in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia (racebook (2012), At face value (2013)), the Art Gallery of South Australia, the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory and the Hood Museum of Art, Hanover, USA.

References
Allum, Lorena (2015), Erasing the Rowley line: inside an Indigenous printmaking workshop, Earshot, ABC Radio National 17 June 2015,
Baum, Tina, 2015 Raymond Zada, in Tarnathi, Festival of Contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art (2015) edited by Nici Cumpston, pp114-115
Browning, Daniel, 2012, AWAYE!, ABC Radio, 18 August 2012, http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/2012/08/aye_20120818_1805.mp3
Crawford, Ashley, Sydney Morning Herald 11 August 2012, Art winner hits back at Facebook racial slurs,
http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/art-winner-hits-back-at-facebook-racial-slurs-20120810-23zoo.html
Eccles, Jeremy, 2017, NGA Quinquennial 2017, Aboriginal Art Directory, http://news.aboriginalartdirectory.com/2017/05/nga-quinquennial-2017.php, accessed May 2017.
Eccles, Jeremy, 2012, The 29th NATSIAAs, Aboriginal Art Directory
http://news.aboriginalartdirectory.com/2012/08/winners-at-the-29th-natsiaas.php, accessed May 2017
Experimenta Recharge, 2015, Catalogue, website, videoclips, http://artsontheinter.net/documentation/experimenta-recharge-overview-tour-venues.pdf, accessed April 2017; http://experimenta.org/recharge/; http://experimenta.org/wp-; content/uploads/2016/04/EXPERIMENTA-RECHARGE-CATALOGUE-LR.pdf
Guildhouse, 2015, The Collections Project, https://guildhouse.org.au/projects/collections-project-raymond-zada/
Kavanah, Carollyn, 2013-14 Adelaide City Council Emerging Curator Program Acquittal, http://www.cityofadelaide.com.au/assets/documents/Carollyn_Kavanagh__Aquital.pdf
Moar, Tahjee, 2016, Cicada Press and the Annual Indigenous Print Workshop:Creating a New Movement, Cicada Press, https://cicadapress.wordpress.com/2016/04/14/cicada-press-and-the-annual-indigenous-print-workshop-creating-a-new-movement/
National Gallery of Australia, 2017, Defying Empire 3rd National Indigenous Art Trienniel, website https://nga.gov.au/defyingempire/artists.cfm?artistirn=42906, accessed April 2017
National Gallery of Australia, acquisitions records https://artsearch.nga.gov.au/Detail.cfm?IRN=225225, accessed April 2017 and https://artsearch.nga.gov.au/search.cfm?view_select=4&order_select=1&creirn=42906&showrows=20
Nelson, Rhonda, 2017 (unpublished) notes of interview with Raymond Zada, 7 April 2017
RMIT Gallery website, 2015, Experimenta Recharge, 6th International Biennial of Media Art, https://rmitgallery.com/tag/raymond-zada/, accessed April 2017

Writers:

Date written:

2017

Last updated:

2017