Alana Hunt: Surveilling a Crime Scene

Surveilling a Crime Scene (2019-23) examines the materialisation of non-indigenous life on Miriwoong Country—through the town of Kununurra and its surrounds. Forming gradually over the last decade of the artist’s life, the threads of this work forge a tapestry that recognises colonisation not as history but as a continuous and present violence, one that is deceptively ordinary.

Co-commissioned by the Sheila Foundation’s Michela and Adrian Fini Artist Fellowship and NCCA, and supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund this suite of new work features a super 8mm film; a flip book of the film; and a constellation of clustered 35mm photographs. Together these summon the absurdities and violence that lie within our aspirations for leisure, for economic growth, and for a home. Always, on someone else’s land.

This work speaks through agendas of development and colonisation and leisure, coursing through our lives and the places we hold dear. It speaks of airports and tourism, of altered ecosystems. A blown up mountain becomes a dam wall that drowns a world while being celebrated by tourists; a multimillion dollar bridge is made for a giant prawn farm that only ever existed as a proposal; an illegal granite mine swiftly abandoned, leaves behind a mirror of our world that is never held to account; small scale gravel pits persistently turn the landscape inside out, like obscured cigarette burns on a tortured body; the great promise of a food bowl is now filled with inedible products like cotton and sandalwood; and the unending maintenance of it all. Of our lives, and our homes, on someone else’s land.