Objects testify is a community-engaged program exploring the colonial legacies of Australia's built environment and its ongoing impact on First Nations communities, led by Wiradjuri anti-disciplinary artist Joel Sherwood Spring.
The exhibition includes Joel Sherwood Spring’s DIGGERMODE (2022), a video work that questions the social and environmental ethics of technology in constructing, storing and sharing images, whether in surveillance databases, museum archives or online. The work considers the problems arising from new technologies that provide open access to cultural belongings and documentation of Indigenous peoples.
“As both a standalone video work and a philosophy of enquiry, DIGGERMODE highlights the environmental impact of our digital world on Indigenous peoples who most intimately feel the growing impacts of capitalism and climate change on their lands and ways of being.” – Joel Sherwood Spring
Objects testify provokes an understanding of architecture as not just the built environment, but the digital and social technologies that propel the conditions of extraction from the mine to the materiality of social life. Sherwood Spring articulates ‘digging’ as the foremost colonial technique that makes all other colonial forms of exploitation possible.
Included in the exhibition are loaned objects from public and private collections which illustrate the technologies of extraction and the ideologies that propel extractive practices. A program of closed and public conversations between First Nations community, scholars, artists, architects, and designers articulates the wider discourses of DIGGERMODE and consider the possibility of new forms of testimony.
About the artist
Joel Sherwood Spring is a Wiradjuri anti-disciplinary artist, writer and broadcaster, who works collaboratively on projects that sit outside established discourses of contemporary art, architecture and power. His discursive and spatial practice examines the contested narratives of Australia’s urban cultural and Indigenous history in the face of ongoing colonisation. Spring is a Co-Director of Future Method Studio, a collaborative and interdisciplinary practice working across architecture, installation and speculative projects. In 2021, he guest edited Runway Journal’s 44th issue TIME and was a commissioned artist for Ceremony, the 4th National Indigenous Art Triennial, 2022 at the National Gallery of Australia, curated by Hetti Perkins.
Exhibition publication
Objects testify was accompanied by a publication with a text by the artist.
Design by Daryl Prondoso
Gallery directions
UTS Gallery
Level 4, Peter Johnson Building (Building 6)
702 Harris St, Ultimo,
University of Technology, Sydney
Banner image: Joel Sherwood Spring, DIGGERMODE (still), 2022. Two-channel video installation. Courtesy the artist. Commissioned by ACMI.
public program
Welcome to Country
Friday 4 August
2pm - 4pm
Join us at UTS Gallery for a Welcome to Country by Aunty Rhonda Dixon Grovenor and an in-conversation with Joel Sherwood Spring and Lorna Munro.
public program
Twitch Syllabus
mondays
7pm - 9pm
Join Joel Sherwood Spring on Twitch, an interactive livestreaming channel, for discussions and readings on the wider discourse of DIGGERMODE. Special guests include Jazz Money, Kat Gledhill-Tucker, Joel Davison, Kathryn Yusoff and Therese Keogh.
public program
Platforms
friday 11 August - RESCHEDULED 1 SEPTEMBER
3pm - 4pm
Astrid Lorange and Andrew Brooks join Joel Sherwood Spring in the gallery for conversation on platforms. Astrid and Andrew are writers and researchers living on unceded Wangal land. They are both founding members of the Infrastructural Inequalities research network, co-editors of Rosa Press, and together as Snack Syndicate are authors of a book of essays titled Homework, published by Discipline in 2021.
public program
Legal Fictions
Friday 18 August
3pm - 4pm
Therese Keogh joins Joel Sherwood Spring in the gallery for a discussion on legal fictions. Therese is an artist and writer who operates at intersections between sculpture, geography, and landscape architecture, to produce multilayered projects exploring the socio-political and material conditions of narrative and knowledge production.
public program
Wiradjuri AI
Friday 8 September
3pm - 4pm
Jazz Money joins Joel Sherwood Spring in the gallery for a talk on Wiradjuri AI and lessons in how (not) to be heard. Jazz is a Wiradjuri poet and artist based on Gadigal land, Sydney. Her practice is centred around poetics while producing works that encompass installation, digital, performance, film and print.
public program
Sydney Design Week: Pavilion of Sand
saturday 16 september
2pm - 4pm
Join a panel discussion with the collaborators of Pavilion of Sand, a collaborative design project lead by Awabakal Architect Shellie Smith alongside Wiradjuri Artist Joel Sherwood Spring, Barkindji Malyangapa artist Jasmine Craciun and FutureMethod Founder Genevieve Murray.
Co-presented with Powerhouse Museum as part of Sydney Design Week.
public program
Sydney Design Week: DIGGERMODE: A film from 'Australia'
wednesday 20 september
3pm - 4pm
Join Joel Sherwood Spring for an artist talk on his work DIGGERMODE, which questions the social and environmental ethics of technology in constructing, storing and sharing our images, whether in surveillance databases, museum archives or online.
Co-presented with Powerhouse Museum as part of Sydney Design Week.
public program
Sydney Design Week: AGGREGATE/ABSENCE
Friday 22 September
2pm - 4pm
Join 22/23 NSW Design (Early Career) Fellow Joel Sherwood Spring, Garigal researcher Lauren Booker, and Wiradjuri man Nathan mudyi Sentance (Head of Collections, First Nations at the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences) as the as they discuss the limitations of the colonial archive and highlight not only its boundaries but also what lies beyond them.
Co-presented with Powerhouse Museum as part of Sydney Design Week.
Press for 'objects testify'
'Diggermode: A Conversation'
Sebastian Henry-Jones in conversation with Joel Sherwood Spring.
