Joel Spring: In Conversation

Please join exhibiting artist Joel Spring and curator Tian Zhang for an online artist talk around the work presented at DARC, and his practice more broadly.

Joel Spring’s work is presented as part of Tending Land, a program marking the 40th anniversary of the Digital Arts Resource Centre (DARC). The Island investigates the story of a piece of land that was recently erased from official maps after existing for over a century. Joel Spring raises questions about the purported veracity of cartography, and how maps often reflect the worldviews and prejudices of those who have the privilege of creating them. For colonizing powers specifically, controlling the representations of and the narratives that can be told about the land guarantees dominance over its domain, including the peoples who inhabited that land for generations. A digital investigation into the history and implications of the non-existent Sandy Island, significant as a navigational point during the British “discovery” of Australia, the work references a wide variety of material, including archival documents, media coverage, cinematic depictions, and virtual maps, mobilized towards addressing that critical point of encounter: the shore. Often enjoyed as a recreational beach, the shore—fictional or real—is underlined in this work as a frontier of confrontation, where claims to collective land ownership are staked. But the shore is also what might momentarily reveal current global information infrastructures, in the form of internet lines buried underwater, running along historical colonial routes, thus implying that the digital realm could perpetuate practices, like mapping, which the majority of humanity might consider neutral but which on examination are deeply problematic.

Joel Spring Joel Sherwood Spring is a Wiradjuri anti-disciplinary artist, who works collaboratively on projects that sit outside established notions of contemporary art & architecture attempting to transfigure spatial dynamics of power through discourse, pedagogies, art, design and architectural practice. Focussed on examining the contested narratives of Australia’s urban cultural and Indigenous history in the face of ongoing colonisation.

Based on Dharug Country in western Sydney, Tian Zhang is a curator, writer, facilitator and collaborative artist working at the intersections of art, cultural practice and social change. Her work is underscored by conversation, criticality, solidarity and joy. She has more than ten years’ experience producing culturally attentive and site responsive projects. With a deep commitment to grassroots and collective methodologies, Tian is a founding co-director of Pari, a collective-run space in Parramatta. In 2021, Tian joined the Artistic Directorate of Next Wave in a new co-artistic leadership model for the organisation. She was previously Chair and co-director at Firstdraft and has co-founded and contributed to arts collectives in Meanjin/Brisbane. Tian is currently a board member of Utp.