Australia has never been secure or comfortable for me: Atong Atem

Atong Atem makes extraordinary art: playful, joyous and inherently political. Her self-portraits and photos of her friends and family, often wearing striking, surreal makeup, raise questions of identity and fantasy, truth and belonging.

Growing up on the south coast of New South Wales, the Ethiopian-born former refugee from South Sudan says she always existed outside the margins in this country, which may account for why her art is "bold and loud".

Atong Atem, Ego 2, 2019, digital print, 60 x 90 cm, edition of 10 + 2 AP. Credit: Courtesy of the artist and MARS Gallery.

“In the 20-plus years I’ve been in Australia, there’s never been a space of absolute comfort or security for me – or people like me who don’t fit in,” she says. “If I’m going to be uncomfortable, I may as well be uncomfortable and honest because there’s already an expectation that [my work] won’t be approved of or liked.”

After escaping the second civil war in her parents’ home country, South Sudan, they spent time in Kakuma refugee camp in Nairobi, Kenya, arriving in Australia when she was six years old.

Atem has seven stunning new large-scale photos on show at Melbourne's Immigration Museum, in a show called To Be Real. The idea for the commission came from Elias Redstone, director of the PHOTO 2020 Festival. With truth as its main theme, the festival went online when COVID-19 struck.

Her star is on the rise, with her work showing as part of the NGV's Triennial and her involvement in both MPavilion and the program for Rising, Melbourne's new winter arts festival. A show of Atem's solo work was held at Messum's Gallery in London in July; she has been exhibited at Red Hook Labs in New York, Vogue Fashion Fair in Milan and Unseen Amsterdam art fair. In Australia, she has shown at Monash's MUMA, Gertrude Contemporary and the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA).

The now Melbourne-based 29-year-old with a self-described "ocker accent" doesn't describe herself as Australian, rather as a South Sudanese artist and writer. She is a big fan of nostalgia - gingham is a recurring theme in her work, conjuring up 1950s and '60s domesticity in America. "I’m nostalgic for things that have nothing to do with my culture but I feel that because I grew up in this country and watched Neighbours and Home and Away."

Even though her work is political, it's also personal. “I’ve described my work in general as an ongoing self-portrait because there is so much self-discovery in learning about world history. It feels like I am constantly making work about myself and it just happens that it resonates with other people.”

Despite having spent most of her life here, artist Atong Atem has never felt secure or comfortable in Australia.Credit: Atong Atem

Her background in painting contributed to the use of makeup, "the need to have a more tactile relationship with the work that I am making". It also reflects a more philosophical approach. "There’s an element of fear or anxiety about being photographed, playing around with being masked, the idea of history as this historically factual medium but how as we get more and more into a technological age, any photo can be doctored or photoshopped."

Atong Atem's 'Saba and Gabby', 2020, commissioned for the Immigration Museum Melbourne. Credit: Courtesy the artist and MARS Gallery  

She is interested in the American science fiction writer Octavia Butler’s work and "in ways we can use fiction and fantasy to speak truth to the world we live in".

Atem's works at the Immigration Museum, while thematically the same, are all different; though the same size, she plays with scale in each. “I was interested in the photographic frame and the opportunity for creating a universe you can peer into,” she says. “I like each image to feel like its own narrative within this larger world.”

After studying art at Sydney University and later RMIT, she was struck by how art history is taught in Australia: from an overwhelmingly European perspective. “Exclusionary of other really interesting, really vibrant art histories and even those that existed on this continent pre-European colonialism. Not once during that time did I see anything that represented my relationship to art outside a European context.”

She wrote an essay about the fact ethnographic photos were the first images of black bodies the world saw. “The way that black people and people like me were portrayed across the world was very specific and really damaging.”

Her first photographs, known as the Studio Series, emulated the European studio style but feature the subjects in brightly coloured Western African fabrics with a nod to the 1950s. Atem says the Studio Series pays homage “to the ways that black people and people across the world responded to ethnographic photography once they had the opportunity to take photos of themselves”.

That’s how she became a photographer. “I’m really interested in a medium that was invented to document the truth.”

The Immigration Museum reopens on November 16; bookings essential. See Atong Atem interviewed as part of PHOTO 2020: photo.org.au/journal/photo-live-with-atong-atem

PHOTO 2021 runs from February 18 to 7 March 7, 2021. See photo.org.au

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