Newell Harry: Esperanto

Murray Art Museum Albury was pleased to present a major exhibition by Newell Harry, the artist’s largest solo project to date. Newell Harry is an Australian born artist of South African and Mauritian descent who draws from an intimate web of connections across Oceania and the wider Asia-Pacific, to South Africa’s Western Cape Province where his extended family continue to reside.

The project presented newly conceived works alongside existing artworks, objects and artifacts in a network that also included specially sourced texts, resource materials and an archival film program. This inter-textual approach, combining the new and the archival, echoed the networks and associated narratives that are a distinct feature of Harry’s practice.

Titled Esperanto, the exhibition referenced a constructed language developed in the late 1800s, which was intended as a means of universal communication, aiding understanding and harmony beyond borders. The term translates as “one who hopes”, as Harry hoped to invite individuals to join him in destabilising master narratives and championing the perspectives and knowledge of groups who have not had a voice in traditional Western knowledge systems. In Esperanto, Harry had constructed a space where many voices from across place and recent time could be heard and knowledge was received not as a set of immutable facts but shifting with greater personal insight.

The exhibition featured a new photographic commission as well as significant works from public and private collections including MAMA’s permanent Collection and the artist’s personal archive.

About the artist

Newell Harry is an Australian-born artist of South African and Mauritian descent. For over the past decade his projects have drawn from an intimate web of recurring travels and connections across Oceania and the wider Asia-Pacific, to South Africa’s Western Cape Province where the artist’s extended family continue to reside. From Pidgin and Creole languages to modes of exchange in the ‘gift economies’ of the South Pacific, Harry’s work often references the cultural agitation brought about by colonial migration and the associated complexity of identity, nomadism, dislocation and myths.

Daily Film Schedule

10.00am - Black Panthers, 1968
A short film of interviews and protests at a rally to free Black Panther Huey P. Newton, directed by Agnes Varda.
Duration: 31 mins

11.00am - Polynesian Panthers, 2010
In the 1950s thousands of Pacific Islanders came to Aotearoa to meet a labour shortage. They faced racism, and in the 1970s, notorious dawn raids by police. In 1971 a group of young people and students set up the Polynesian Panthers Party to stand up for the rights of the Pasifika community.
Duration: 52 mins

12.00pm - Have You Heard From Johannesburg: Fair Play, 2010
A feature length documentary by Connie Field that shines light on the global citizens movements that took on South Africa’s apartheid regime, centered on sporting boycotts.
Duration: 1 hour 35 mins

2.00pm - The Life and Death of Steven Biko World in Action Season 14, episode 2, 1977
Coverage of the immediate aftermath of the death of anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko while in the custody of South African police.
Duration: 30 mins

3.00pm - Hermits of Borroloola, David Attenborough: Quest under Capricorn, Episode 2, 1963
First transmitted in 1963, David Attenborough travels to the Northern Territory and visits three colonial settlers in the isolated area of Borroloola, seeking solitude.
Duration: 29 mins

4.00pm - Black Panthers, 1968
Repeat screening from 10am
Duration: 31 mins, final film in daily program