Acknowledgements
Alana’s video has been developed during a residency with the Kimberley Land Council via SPACED’s Rural Utopia’s program which is supported by the Government of Western Australia through the Department of Local Government, Sport and Creative Industries, and the RISE Fund – an Australian Government Initiative. Special thanks to Alex Romano.

Kush acknowledgements Amrita Gupta and the Council for Art and Social Practice, Anant Jain, Shubhangi Singh, Bahbak Hashemi-Nezhad, Paribartana Mohanty, Phil Newman and the Hornsby Men’s Shed, Ankur Badhwar, Neena Badhwar, Vijay Badhwar, Alana Hunt and Jasmin Stephens.

Sohrab thanks Tristen Harwood, James Nguyen and Veeranaganasolanki Kumari for extending the notational aspect of his practice. Scribe Anna Pettifer is also thanked.

Jasmin is presenting the exhibition as a UNSW Scientia PhD researcher and with additional support from UNSW Art & Design. Jasmin acknowledges Warmun Art Centre and the support of Mr R Peters’ family. Together with the artists and The Cross Art Projects – Diana Baker Smith, Belle Blau, Simon Blau, Phillip Boulten, Harry Cope, Suzi Gilligan, John Kavanagh and Jenna Price, Emma McLean, Ian McLean, Elizaveta Proiaeva and UTS Gallery and Art Collection are also acknowledged. Sincere thanks to Teela Reid for opening the exhibition.

Printing sponsored by Pixel Perfect.

Resources

• Utopias Residency: Alana Hunt in Kununurra, Artist’s Text #2
• Utopias Residency: Alana Hunt in Kununurra, Artist’s Text #3
• Utopias Residency: Alana Hunt in Kununurra, Artist’s Text #4
• Every Inch: the bureaucratic effect in colonisation, Room Sheet

Brief biographies

Kush Badhwar

Kush Badhwar is an artist and a filmmaker interested in collaborative practice, improvised and informal political engagement and the ecology of sound and image across time. Australian-born, while living in Navi Mumbai and Helsinki, he studies art and urbanism at the Estonian Academy of the Arts in Tallinn and is a board member or in the parlance of Frontyard Projects in Marrickville – one of its janitors. For some time Kush has been working with CASP (Council for Arts & Social Practice) and photographer Anant Jain to understand the complexities surrounding the construction of Navi Mumbai International Airport. He has recently exhibited with e-flux Video & Film (2020) and Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen, Innsbruck (2021).

Alana Hunt

Alana is an artist and writer who lives on Miriwoong Country in north-west Australia. Through her interdisciplinary practice, Alana examines the violence that ensues from the politics of nation-making and the impact of colonisation on daily life. Alana’s long-standing relationship with South Asia – and with Kashmir in particular – has informed her widely-circulating artist’s book Cups of nun chai (2020). Alana’s work was last seen in Sydney at Carriageworks for The National last year and will be exhibited in Goa, India, at Sunaparanta Goa Centre for the Arts and in Nepal, for Photo Kathmandu in 2023.

Sohrab Hura

Sohrab Hura is a New Delhi-based photographer who is a full member of Magnum Photos. His autobiographical journal-like approach percolates through publications (Ugly Dog Books), photography, film, text and sound. Cultivating a scepticism about the photographic, his concerns centre on images as systems with afterlives. In the Indian electoral context, Hura is increasingly turning his attention to images that are ‘enabling’ rather than disruptive through their beautifying and aspirational tactics. His film The Last Head & The Birdwas recently screened at the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival and has been collected by MOMA New York.

Ian McLean

Ian is Hugh Ramsay Chair of Australian Art History at the University of Melbourne. He has published extensively across cross-cultural terrain – his most recent books include Indigenous Archives: The Making and Unmaking of Aboriginal Art, with Darren Jorgensen (2017); Rattling Spears: A History of Indigenous Australian Art (2016); Double Desire: Transculturation and Indigenous Art (2014) and How Aborigines Invented the Idea of Contemporary Art (2011).

James Nguyen

James Nguyen is an artist living on Boonwurrung Land. He uses conversations and drawings to think through his relationships with his family, friends and diasporic histories. In 2023 James is presenting a major exhibition at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) in Narrm/Melbourne as a recipient of the Copyright Agency Partnerships (CAP) Commission.

Renu Savant 

Renu is a filmmaker based in Mumbai and Ratnagiri in India. She works with non-fiction as personal ethnography to insert herself as a woman filmmaker in her time and space. She has been documenting people and political contexts in the western coastal region of Konkan, India, for the past few years. Her fiction and non-fiction films have received various awards and recently – her long duration film of 3 hrs 50 mins Many Months in Mirya was screened in the Yokohama Triennale in 2020. Renu was chosen by BAFTA in the UK as a honoree for their Breakthrough India programme in 2021.

Veeranganakumari Solanki

Veeranganakumari Solanki is an independent curator and writer based in Mumbai who explores how interdisciplinary forms and practices merge to create dialogues in public and private spaces. Veeranganakumari is Program Director with Space Studio, Baroda. She teaches in the MFA in Curatorial Practice course at Kathmandu University and was the Brooks International Research Fellow at the Tate Modern in 2019. She is also a core member of Art Chain India.