Richard Bell: Imagining Victory
Richard Bell
The dinner party, 2013
Film still
Image courtesy of the artist
Imagining Victory was a significant exhibition by Australian artist Richard Bell, centred on a trilogy of recent video projects.
The exhibition, developed by Artspace and toured by Museums & Galleries of NSW, presented the highly acclaimed and provocative works Scratch an Aussie (2008) and Broken English (2009) as well as the series culminating work The Dinner Party (2013).
Bell had been a leading force within the field of contemporary Australian art since the 1990s, making provocative gestures and works that often confront Australia's arguably contentious racial relations, or as Bell describes of his objectives, as 'an activist masquerading as an artist'. The artist frequently integrated expressions of political, cultural, social and economic disenchantment emerging out of the uneasy relationship between Aboriginal peoples and colonial migrants to Australia.
