Writing & Society Research Centre seminar

Event Name
Writing & Society Research Centre seminar
Date
17 April 2015
Time
11:00 am - 12:30 pm
Location
Bankstown Campus

Address (Room): 3.G.55

Description

Writer, curator and poet John Mateer will discuss his recent art/historical project The Quiet Slave: a history in eight episodes in the context of his on-going interest in the nexus between scriptural traditions and migrations, voluntary and forced, in the Indian Ocean region. Developed over the course of two years for the Perth-based visual arts biennale Spaced2, The Quiet Slave is an historically accurate fiction set in the Indian Ocean in the early 19th Century, describing the first years of settlement on the Cocos-Keeling Islands, an atoll between Perth and Sri Lanka, through the eyes of a female Malay slave belonging to the controversial Englishman Alexander Hare.

Speakers: John Mateer is a poet, writer and curator. His work includes essays, books of poems and Semar's Cave, a prose travelogue on Indonesia. For two decades he has published criticism on contemporary art. He was on the steering committee The South Project, a Melbourne-based venture which developed cultural links across the Southern Hemisphere. In 2005 he was a fellow at the Iowa International Writing Program, supported by the Chicago Humanities Festival, and 2012 he was the Australia Council’s inaugural art writer-in-residence at ACME, London. He convened the 2013 symposium The Ambiguity of our Geography at Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, as part In Confidence: Reorientations in Recent Art, the Indian Ocean-focused exhibition he curated for that institution. Among his books are Southern Barbarians, Emptiness: Asian Poems 1998-2012 and Unbelievers, or 'The Moor'. His most recent volume is Namban, the Portuguese-language translation of Southern Barbarians. Currently he is researching traces of the explorer William Dampier's voyages in Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver's Travels.

Web page: http://www.uws.edu.au/writing_and_society/events/writing_and_society_seminars

Contact
Name: Suzanne Gapps

s.gapps@uws.edu.au

Phone: x6780

School / Department: Writing & Society Research Centre