Australian Graffiti
Christian THOMPSON
6-10pm Thursday, Sept 8
Java Café & Gallery (upstairs)
56 Sihanouk Blvd

Sponsored by the Australian Embassy

Australian Graffiti, an exhibition by the artist Christian Thompson, brings an international perspective on cultural identity to the festival. Through photography and video he explores the tropes of urban and rural Australian iconography. His playful, yet critical, work brings to the fore a notion of identity that is at once fluid, appropriated and performed whilst referencing the nature of graffiti and its territorial markings.

Christian Thompson is a Bidjara man of the Kunja Nation from central west of Queensland, Australia who also has European heritage. His work is primarily focused on the performative exploration of multiple identities, and in performances and photographic works he inhabits a range of personas achieved through simple costumes and carefully orchestrated poses and backdrops.

Thompson's artistic practice has been informed by his absorption of a wide range of cultures as a young Aboriginal artist growing up in an urban environment in the 1980s and 1990s. He has presented his photographs, videos and performance works in numerous solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally including the Andy Warhol Museum, USA; Wood Street Galleries, USA; National Indigenous Art Triennial, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Aboriginal Art Museum, Utrecht, The Netherlands. He is currently a PHD candidate at Oxford University in the UK.