Growing up in a culture that explains the world through difference and opposites was a challenging reality for a young Atong Atem.
It was like, okay, so if day is good and night is bad, if white is good and black is bad, then that must also apply to skin. Because, how could it not?Atong Atem
In this episode of Seen, Yumi Stynes chats to artist and writer Atong Atem about finding comfort in science fiction, discovering a world of artists who looked like her, and the future she hopes her work will create.
Hosted by Yumi Stynes, Seen is a podcast series about cultural creatives rising to excellence despite arriving in a role-model vacuum. Over the series you'll hear from trailblazers like journalist Narelda Jacobs, musician Ray Ahn, groundbreaking scientist Professor Veena Sahajwalla and more about the transformative moment when they felt seen.
Host: Yumi Stynes
Created by: Bernadette Phương Nam Nguyễn
Executive Producer: Kate Montague
Producers: Bernadette Phương Nam Nguyễn and Cassandra Steeth
Junior Producer: Alison Zhuang
Sound design and mix: Ravi Gupta
Theme music: Yeo
Art: Evi-O Studios
SBS podcast team: Caroline Gates, Max Gosford, Joel Supple
Image of Atong by Kristoffer Paulsen
Transcript
(Theme music building)
Atong Atem: Every single time I went to a supermarket, there would always be like a little kid who'd be like, “Mummy, why is she black?” If I see like a child who's of speaking age, who is not black, I'm like, ‘Oh, here we go!’
It felt like too much of an ask. It's like, you know what? Today I would rather not go outside with the sign on my head that says, ‘say something to me.’ Not every day do I want that.
Yumi Stynes: You’re hearing from artist Atong Atem.
Atem: I remember as a kid being very aware of my skin and thinking it was beautiful because I looked like my mum and my mum was the most beautiful person to me. But then in school and in church as well, interestingly enough, there'd just be so many like metaphors that kind of use darkness as a negative and as a kid that really affected me.
It was like, ‘okay, so if day is good and night is bad, if white is good and black is bad, then that must also apply to skin.’ Because, how could it not?
Stynes: I’m Yumi Stynes and this is Seen, a podcast about trailblazers who, ignored by the mainstream, rise to excellence anyway.
We start by acknowledging the Traditional Owners of the land on which we record, whose culture includes a rich tradition of storytelling, art-making, and blakness, the Cammeraygal and Gadigal people, and their Elders past and present.
This episode features some explicit language, please listen with discretion.
(Theme music fade out)
Atem: It's not always the overt violence that fucks us up the most. It's usually the daily toll of existing in a world that doesn't recognise us as normal.
Stynes: Atong Atem is a creator whose work is shown from here to Paris, London, and New York. Her work is multidisciplinary, from film, to textile to photography and it manifestly embodies what it means to be black from the artist’s perspective.
Atong migrated to Australia as a young girl with her South Sudanese family after spending time in a Kenyan refugee camp. Their arrival was, shall we say, quite unceremonious.
Atem: In my family and my culture, I suppose a lot of South Sudanese people, when we travel and migrate especially, it's quite an occasion. So we get dressed up and I was wearing this fluffy, silk, cupcake style dress, and my brothers were all dressed up in matching outfits and stuff. So it felt like this huge occasion. And then it's just sort of like, okay, good luck, here you are.
Stynes: Wow, sort of dropped off at the side of the road kind of thing?
Atem: Absolutely. Yeah. (Wow) It's what I imagine, like dogs that get abandoned experience, like they get to have a treat, they go on this beautiful car ride and then, all right, see ya (laughing).
(Music)
Stynes: Atong’s family escaped Sudan during the civil war and fled to Ethiopia… from there they went to Kenya, eventually arriving in Sydney in 1997, where the migration of South Sudanese people in Australia hadn’t really started yet…
Atem: They were one of like probably three other South Sudanese families my family knew of in the entirety of the country. The majority of South Sudanese people who migrated to Australia came here from about 2005 onwards.
(Music fade out)
Atem: You know, we came here as refugees. None of us spoke English. And then they put us into a caravan at the caravan park in Gosford until they could find appropriate housing for us. So it was just this sort of weird kind of constant momentum.
And I don't know how I felt then, but in hindsight it kind of feels as though we were so accustomed to constant movement and, not being settled like we were, you know, unsettled peoples. We were constantly fleeing. You kind of are somewhere for a short period of time until you can't be there anymore and you got to kind of always be prepared to leave.
(Music)
Stynes: But they did eventually settle down and stop moving, finding a home in New South Wales’ Central Coast.
(Music fade out, sound design: beach waves)
Stynes: And even though the idea of a dark-skinned, non-English-speaking African family on a beachie Aussie soapie seems incongruous… Atong actually did okay in this environment.
Atem: I tried to be a surfer chick, but I'm not a very solid swimmer. I was like, I've got a Roxy backpack. Quiksilver swimmers. Like, you can't touch me. I'm at the beach. I look cute. I could be in Home and Away. And it wasn't until adults were like, ‘No.’ That I was like, ‘No?’
Interestingly enough, because we were so young when my siblings and I migrated, we sort of grew up with our neighbouring kids and whatever together. So there wasn't a huge sense of ostracisation from our peers. Most of that came from the adults in our lives and the adults in our communities. So it was kind of easy to not think much about our differences for the most part. Like it wasn't great all the time, but for the most part we were just all kind of kids and we grew up together. It wasn't until we got a bit older, like teenage years post puberty onwards, that our differences were sort of weaponized against us.
Stynes: Not just weaponised - but the nuance of her background was flattened out by those who could understand her as only Black, and African.
Atem: It's really, really fascinating because there's so many hundreds of language groups and tribal groups and ethnic groups in South Sudan. We referred to ourselves as Dinka or Manyang, which is our word for like our people. Like we have words for ourselves.
(Music)
Stynes: Growing into consciousness of her blackness was like a slow accumulation of cultural baggage.
Atem: I remember as a kid being very aware of my skin and thinking it was beautiful because I looked like my mum and my mum was the most beautiful person to me. But then in school and in church as well, interestingly enough, there'd just be so many like metaphors that kind of use darkness as a negative and as a kid that really affected me.
Because it felt like, how are all these white people comfortably saying “oh, that's a dark joke,” or like “don't be dark sided,” or like because we grew up going to church, there was a lot of the fight between dark and light and all this and all these things that were considered really terrible about darkness, like literal darkness and metaphorical darkness.
(Music fade out)
Atem: It was like, okay, so if day is good and night is bad, if white is good and black is bad, then that must also apply to skin. Because, you know, like, how could it not? There's just a lot of cognitive dissonance when I try to sort of bring that up and question why we were using these two extremes in such inflexible ways.
(Music)
Stynes: If you take a look at Atong’s art you might notice it takes inspiration from fantasy and science fiction: worlds where anything is possible. Since she was a child, alien superstars were her pinups.
(Music fade out)
Atem: It was something that my family, like that was our bonding thing. So on like an evening, we would sit together. We watched Stargate consistently all the way through. My mum would record shows for us while we were at school, so we'd come home and she'd taped like Power Rangers or Dragon Ball Z while we were at school. There was just something about television as this familial bonding thing, especially for our family who had to sort of learn English on our own and had to learn the culture in which were now living on our own. So there was so much that television offered to us.
Compared to say your Home and Aways and your Neighbours, science fiction and the storylines in the way that it sort of speaks to the human experience was so fantasy-oriented that it allowed space for us to project our own experiences onto it. Versus, say, watching a storyline on Neighbours or Home in Away which was about how difficult it is for this middle class white family to deal with the fact that their daughter doesn't have a date to the school, formal or whatever, which I'm sure that's really difficult. But, there was just so little space for us to connect.
Stynes: Having worked in TV - I know that the exclusion of black and brown people from so much that goes to air is not an accident. It’s a choice that’s handled, checked, vetoed and approved by a chain of human decision-makers who, all through the process of creation, from concept to broadcast, consistently choose to exclude everything but whiteness.
Atem: Over the years, I've spent a lot of nerdy hours over-thinking science fiction. And I do think that there's an element of that story of the other, the alien other and how most sci-fi seeks to in some ways like humanise alien characters and to show the ways in which, the immediate response to try to destroy these other creatures or whatever isn't necessarily positive. And there's allusions to colonialism in a lot of science fiction narratives. So I think in some ways there was a sense of I get this and I understand this, and it's one of very few spaces in which I suppose, like Western media will actually offer empathy to those who have been colonised.
Stynes: And if the new creatures aren’t destroyed, they have to do something we’ve talked about on this podcast before: they have to become the Model Minority.
Atem: So there was a sense of an expectation from us as migrants to be constantly and extremely grateful and to prove ourselves to the general population. Because by virtue of them being born in Australia or whatever or having automatic citizenship, they were the ones that we had to appeal to in our quest to become part of the society that we were in.
And that kind of manifested in lots of different ways. It was either having to be better than they expected to prove that we were capable in terms of academics or whatever, but also not too good because they didn't want us to be better than their children. We had to sort of fit a very specific, but also kind of impossible standard at all times.
And the cracks really began to show when my siblings and I kind of started to form our own identities. I was a bit punk, post all of the surfie stuff. And my brothers were just like young boys wanting to do their own thing and they played soccer and wanted to be great at it. When we tried to be our own people outside of the expectations that society kind of placed on us as African migrants from South Sudan. That's when the trouble really started, I think.
(Music)
Atem: I remember having experiences in school with teachers who would tell me what I could and couldn't do with it. Like there wasn't a sense of being asked, you know, what I wanted. So for example, I wanted to study interior design or architecture at uni and I remember being told “it's so nice that you can dream so big.” Not like, oh, here are the practical ways in which you can achieve this. Like, I just really distinctly remember people kind of treating me like a three year old that was like, I want to be an astronaut.
And there was a lot of actually overt racism as well, which in a lot of ways was a little bit easier to cope because you can sort of villainize someone that yells at you, and, you know, calls you a racial slur or whatever, when you're just walking past the street. But it is so much harder to villainize or see, you know, negativity or whatever in your school teachers who are saying you should think about going to Tafe and doing cleaning jobs on the side or perhaps you can lower your standards or whatever and kind of forced me to kind of prematurely give up on stuff, but also do things with the expectation of no outcome, which in its own kind of way worked out well for me. (Laughing) You know, I was like, I might fail, but I'll do it anyway.
(Music)
Stynes: A pivotal moment in the lives of many artists - is when they finally find like-minded people. For Atong Atem, it was in the early years of playing the Sims, chatting on internet message boards and exploring those early prototypes of what would eventually become social media.
Atem: They call it microblogging. And the whole thing was that you'd have your own little Tumblr blog and it was a cute little web page that people could go to. You could upload images, you could write poems or write anything and people could repost but also comment in their repost. And the thing that made it really cool is that it like lots of very unique niche communities developed out of it. Whatever you were into there would be a community of it on Tumblr and the thing I was into was my culture, being South Sudanese, wanting to experience media in which I didn't feel excluded.
(Music fade out)
Stynes: Suddenly Atong was plugged into a whole world of artists, writers, thinkers who not only looked like her but also shared her history - a history which here, in this Eurocentric mainstream culture, was completely ignored.
Atem: As a kid, I think I subconsciously knew that there was a lot of other black people doing really cool things and there had been for centuries and centuries from the beginning of time. And I just wanted access to it. So I found people on Tumblr who were making websites where they'd just shared black art or they just shared black fashion, or they shared their thoughts on social issues from the perspective of a young queer black guy who lives in New York or from the perspective of a young mother who lives in Barbados or something. It was just this avenue to learn and experience the wide world of people whose interests I'm interested in. So yeah, it kind of helped me feel not alone in the world.
(Music)
Atem: One of the first artists that I saw on Tumblr that really opened my eyes is a Kenyan American artist named Wangechi Mutu. And she makes works, then, the works that I saw were these interesting collaged images of like fantastical women, black women made from cut-outs of like magazines, like porn magazines, fashion magazines.
Stynes: Those early moments of exposure to leaders in art can really help a young artist connect with what’s possible - in her own creative output. Microblogging gave Atong an audience who appreciated her offerings, and it felt like the stakes were low. In a safe environment like that? It can be life-changing to be seen.
(Music fade out)
Atem: Oh, I was so unashamed. It just allowed me to just share things that I was working on. And every single kind of success or whatever that I've gained has really come from initially sharing those things online, having responses or no responses, and just sort of feeling like encouraged to be able to share without fear.
Stynes: This safe space exposed Atong to the language of critical race theory.
Atem: What it gave me was kind of direct language for things I had visceral knowledge of. So for experiences that I had had but didn’t have names for. So for example, misogynoir, which is the very specific kind of misogyny experienced by black women because of them being black and women. And it's like, ‘oh, that's that, that's that thing that I've experienced!’ or it was the first time I learnt the word Colourism and I was like, ‘oh!’ I didn't have a word to describe how, black people, African people, or just people in general would be treated differently based on how close to white they appeared, you know, regardless of their heritage and things like featurism, which was beyond that, like about, you know, what kind of facial features do you have and you know, even things like ableism.
I didn't have a language like it wasn't just about having words to discuss my own personal experience, but having words to interpret and understand ways that I could fuck up and and cause harm to other people as well. So it was like it was illuminating in a way that made me feel really seen and really gave me language for my experiences. But it was also illuminating in a way that made me realise the ways in which I was also capable of causing harm to others in ways in which I was privileged as well.
Cause I think I spent my whole life thinking that my family am I as a, as a kid anyway, that we were kind of, you know, as bad as it gets because we are refugees were dark skinned African blah blah blah blah blah blah, blah, blah. And then coming on to Tumblr and finding other people who were similar age to me or had similar interests to me. And it's like, oh, we got out of the refugee camp. This person's writing their Tumblr blog from the refugee camp. Just like lots of different experiences. I think it just normalised having conversations inter and intra community conversations that kind of helped me reposition myself in the world. Just made me feel like I could really talk about myself with authority.
(Music)
Stynes: Atong and I record this episode at a time when yet another racism scandal has erupted in Australia. Now, if you haven’t seen these before this is usually how it goes. Typically, a non-white person speaks out about racist injustice they’ve experienced.
And typically, their white workmates or sporting teammates deny the racism, never saw it happen. They rally around the alleged perpetrator, and subtly or overtly ostracise the non-white person for being unsporting, for selling their teammate out, being a whinger, and above all, for bullshitting about something that “isn’t even real!”
It’s worth mentioning that this occurs as we record because this is the environment in which we live, where to speak about racism in this country you have to have a certain amount of trust that a) you will be believed, and b) you won’t be punished for talking about it.
Is being hyper visible dangerous?
Atem: Absolutely. It is. What do we mean by dangerous is maybe the thing, right? Depending on where in the world I am, it can be quite literally dangerous to my body or existence. And I've experienced racial violence and I've like I've experienced the danger, the physical violence and physical danger that comes with being hyper visible.
But another danger that is more prominent, more everyday that I've experienced and that has like really kind of messed with me in the past is just the constant need to be constantly aware of your surroundings, the awareness that you have of your hyper visibility, the way that you navigate the world never being invisible, the way that if I- If I'm not wearing certain clothes like a hoodie or whatever, I will just be constantly stared at.
Every single time I went to a supermarket, there would always be like a little kid who'd be like, Mommy, why is she black? Like…
Stynes: Wow.
Atem: Every single time. (Yeah) And it's like, the kid is just making an observation. There's nothing wrong with that. But when you experience that on every second aisle, when you're at the supermarket, just trying to get groceries every time you go to the supermarket or like a department store or anything. Like anytime. I literally if I see like a child who's of speaking age, who is not black, I'm like, ‘Oh, here we go.’ Like it’s just… (Laughing)
Stynes: You have to steel yourself. And it’s okay - maybe - if you’re match-fit. But if you’re carrying vulnerability…?
Atem: I had a period of time where I was just dealing with way too much. I was really busy with work, and so all of that kind of racial trauma on top of it meant that I became a little bit afraid of leaving the house. It was just not even an outright fear. But I just wanted to be safe and comfortable, and the only place in which I was safe and comfortable was my own home.
Stynes: Atong says the tension of potential violence would get worse when dog-whistling politicians villainized ethnic groups to attract racist votes.
Atem: I basically stopped getting certain trains (laughing) they would like-because certain people would be on those trains. And I'd be the kind of people that would just be like, you know, “go back to where you came from,” all that stuff. And it's like, first of all, do you have a ticket? Because I will take it. (Laughing) Like I would like to visit my family please it was. Yeah, it was real intense. And it's so, you know, fun to joke about and all of that. But it's violence, you know, it's absolute violence and it's not safe. And people were attacked, people were injured, people were hurt.
Stynes: When somebody says something like that to you, go back to where you came from on a train. Do others come to your defence?
Atem: Not often. But I don't blame people because there's often a fear of violent retaliation, because people like that will often fight back at whoever is trying to help you. But I also look, she's a classy girl, but she did grow up on the Central Coast so I can mouth off (laughing) like I know I can hold my own. And I hate to admit that sometimes, like, it's just the release that I need. I'm like, ‘I dare you, like, say it, say it!’
Stynes: Is there a place in the world that you can just exist?
Atem: It was really fascinating to me because I moved from the Central Coast where we were super isolated, we stood out like a sore thumb to then moving to Newcastle for university where it was pretty much the same. And then Sydney and it was like, oh my god. Like I'm one of a slightly bigger percentage and I felt like that was as good as it could be. And then years later I moved to Melbourne and it was even like this seems to be in the inner city, way more racial diversity in Melbourne and a lot more people that look like me. So it was like, ‘oh wow. Okay, shit, it got a little bit better.’ And then travelling really kind of opened my eyes to the fact that I've really accepted crumbs in terms of my, my comfort and places in which I can feel comfortable.
Stynes: There’s a cliche about the best artists failing art school. Well Atong Atem dropped out seven times.
Atem: I dropped out a bunch, tried four different schools, and I realised that for me I had my own things to deal with just in terms of my own emotional stuff like dealing with clinical depression.
But I also wasn't finding an avenue for me to ask the questions that I wanted to ask and have them answered. I didn't feel like the community or like the kind of intellectual curiosity that I was supported with on Tumblr that didn't really exist in uni for me. I think a lot has changed since then, but it was just really disheartening to sort of time after time see examples of beautiful paintings and they depict things that have absolutely nothing to do with where I come from and knowing intrinsically and actually and factually that there there is a history of painting from all kinds of places around the world.
Stynes: Art being taught through a white lens - with not even crumbs of comfort, safety, or ancestral recognition - did not work for Atong.
Atem: I really, really struggled to be engaged in the art history that I was being taught because it felt so foreign.
(Music)
Atem: One of the first times that that changed for me was when I went to the MCA and they were having an exhibition of works by an artist named Yinka Shonibare, who is a Nigerian British artist who makes these incredible sculptures of people wearing 18th century Victorian style dresses but made with African wax print materials. Like that’s sort of his thing. He uses these materials to recreate colonial imagery, to talk about colonialism from the perspective of an African person who lives in Britain, and blah blah blah. And I was like, ‘Why is no one telling me about this in uni?’
I felt vindicated in a way because I was like, I know there's more. I'm just not being shown it. And that tipped me into the idea of like, perhaps I don't have to do the readings that I'm given. Perhaps I can seek out my own information, my own history that I actually find fascinating. And that just opened the floodgates and I learnt so much. And it wasn't even necessarily that I needed to see African art by African artists, although that's really profound.
I just needed to see a history that acknowledged the existence of art practices from people outside of the European canon. And then that made me feel like, okay, yeah, I can make art about myself. So, yeah I went back to the Internet after my university failures.
(Music fade out)
Stynes: It sounds to me like Atong Atem graduated from the University of Internet with high class honours.
If you look at her art now, particularly her photography, you might be faintly reminded of old fashioned pictures that we’d once have found in a Natural History museum.
Atem: Ethnography is like the study of cultures and the study of people. And ethnographic photography, when I talk about it, I'm talking about that very specific colonial ethnographic photography, which was photographs taken by British or European colonisers who would go to these places that they had colonised and take photographs of the people from those places in the same way that you might photograph plants. It was about presenting cultures that had been conquered in a way that justified the fact that they'd been conquered. So it didn't seek to humanise people. It didn't seek to celebrate or acknowledge their identities as individuals. It sought to sort of present these cultures as fascinations and as things to be studied.
Part of why ethnographic photographs was so dangerous and are still so dangerous is because they function to justify the mistreatment of the people that are photographed and they function to justify the dehumanisation of those people. So it's very, very rare to see ethnographic photographs in which people look like individuals and are being celebrated for being actual humans. Also on another end, they are often the only kind of documented evidence of people's clothing, people's homes, people's customs. So there's a double edged sword for me, because as a South Sudanese person, ethnographic photography is most often the only way that I can see cultural practises from South Sudan.
If I want to see cultural artefacts from South Sudan, I don't go to South Sudan, I go to the British Museum. So there's like a huge hurt in that. And I think that's why I'm so focussed on it because the Colonial Project worked so well that I need to rely on the tools of colonialism in order to learn about myself.
(Music)
Stynes: So is Atong’s art about revising history? Or rewiring ones’ connection to it?
(Music fade out)
Atem: Initially, the first series of paintings I did was repainting kind of these colonial ethnographic photographs of like kings and chiefs across different parts of Africa and repainting them and adding colour to them because they were these black and white images. And it felt like there was something about it felt like a reclamation of this history. It felt like I was participating in it. I was adding colour to it, I was bringing it to life. And then slowly that evolved into taking photographs that were reminiscent of that post ethnographic kind of post-colonial studio photography. So every art that I've made, every art piece, every art series, whatever, regardless of the medium, it's always been a self-portrait and it's always been about my relationship to history, and it's always been about acknowledging that, you know, just by virtue of existing my my work is part of this canon of artists.
(Music)
Stynes: Let’s go back to in-and-out of art school dropout Atong. Some of the time battling clinical depression. How did the leap occur from this passionate but inexperienced young woman, to the world-renowned artist?
It was late one night in a university studio…
Atem: I'd hired a camera the day before and I needed a camera and they would like film still digital. And I was like, “Yes,” (laughing) I got no idea what I was doing. But it was like it was personal and it was intimate. I knew what I was trying to do. I didn't know how to do it, but I just figured it out with my friends who were also my community. It was a celebration of what I didn't realise at the time was a very pivotal moment.
One of the people that I will shout out who got me my first major exhibition here in in Melbourne was Léuli Eshrāghi who's a curator, and they were curating a group show at Gertrude Contemporary and they asked me to show these images that I had literally only shown on Tumblr and Instagram, these photographs. And I was like, Oh, that's not like “art, art.” Like, it's just photos. It's just I'm just playing around. And they were just like, No, no. I think it's really special. And they were curating a show that was about global art practices and it fit right in and everything literally just exploded from there.
Stynes: The Studio Series is now a part of the permanent collection at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne and Atong is revered as a national treasure.
The portraits definitely retain atoms of ethnographic-styling - with the deadpan stillness of the models and the studio-bound set-ups. But the inherent self-acceptance of the subjects, and the blackness of their skin, with the eruptions of colour and pattern? This is the art of a fresh young voice and it’s loud.
(Music fade out)
Atem: Look I'll never not talk about blackness in the same way that I'll never not talk about myself, it's part of my experience. And beyond it being part of my experience, it's part of what has led to me having self-love. I just think black people are fucking cool. I love us. I love what we do, I love what we're capable of, I love our cultures, and that goes specifically for South Sudanese people. So there's like a love that there's a huge love and celebration.
Stynes: Was there a point where you kind of went, listen, I'm I'm fucking doing this, you guys. I'm actually doing it. It's working. It's like I'm one of those very, very few people that gets to do this for real.
Atem: Yeah, I remember the point quite specifically. It wasn't that long ago. It was when I first had to start by actually paying taxes (laughing).
Stynes: What's the threshold? Here in Australia?
Atem: Look, it's pretty low. It's like $18,000. But I literally was just not making any money. All of my twenties was working in cafes, cash in hand, all of that. But I was still like living my best life because I was free. And then things sort of changed in the last probably three or four years is when it really became like, Oh no, I like, I need an accountant and I need all of this like extra stuff. Like I need to spend money because I'm making money, which was such a foreign and like annoying concept and it's so sorry another tangent. I'm like the person who's like, Yeah, tax the rich, tax everyone. I was voting for all of the political parties that were like raising taxes on, like, potholes need to be filled, the hospitals need to be better. Every single tax season when I feel a little teardrop rolling down my eye. I'm like, ‘you voted for this Atong.’ (Laughing)
Stynes: There's your pothole filled buddy.
Atem: Exactly
Stynes: With success has come visibility, which can be challenging for someone who just wants to make art.
Atem: I had a bit of an anxiety at first when I'd first be asked to talk about my work because I felt this sort of pressure to speak about blackness in a way that would encompass the majority of the black people in Australia or in Melbourne or whatever. And that's just not right. I bought into the pressure because I bought into, you know, people reaching out to me and asking me to speak on behalf of my communities. And that's where that's wrong and that's what I want to stop.
What I will continue is people asking me about me. Like, what do you think? How do you feel? Like what brings you joy, you know, what's your mum like as opposed to how do South Sudanese people feel about blah blah blah. I couldn't tell you. I don't know. I have no idea about how my community feels about anything. I just know about how I feel and I know my experiences.
Stynes: Is there an importance for you personally in being seen, being seen by little kids, being seen by art practitioners, collectors, gallery owners, powerful people and very powerless people?
Atem: I think I get really wary of that because I get nervous about being “the one.” I'm not Neo, this is not The Matrix. It can be really easy to refer to the person that has the most attention as the person. So like, you know, I'm now the African female artist in Australia or whatever. I think if anything I would like to be recognised or like looked at as a door that is ajar that leads to so many others because I'm not the first, I'm not the best, I'm not the only.
For me the future is one in which the conversations that I've had to have aren't necessary anymore. And where the demands that I've had to make aren't necessary anymore. But I kind of, for me think that what I want to do and what the future that I'm trying to work towards by being public, is a future in which we're just more honest about the world in which we live.
(Theme music)
Stynes: A world full of diversity, histories through multiple lenses and black surfer girls. And I think we’re getting closer each day.
This has been Seen. Hosted by me, Yumi Stynes, created by Bernadette Phương Nam Nguyễn with Audiocraft, in collaboration with SBS.
From Audiocraft this show was produced by Bernadette Phương Nam Nguyễn and Cassandra Steeth, our Junior Producer is Alison Zhuang. Sound design and mix is done by Ravi Gupta, and executive producer Kate Montague.
The SBS team are Caroline Gates, Joel Supple, and Max Gosford.
Our podcast artwork is created by Evi O Studios and music is by Yeo.
(Theme music fades, music sting)
Atem: If I'm in the mood to like just go there, then it can be like a really beautiful emotional release to yell back. And, you know, I try to be a bit creative with my insults and stuff (giggling) but otherwise it's just like, you know what? “Mate like I'm on my period. I have to go to work. It's really late, I'm hungry. Can we just just pause? Can we do this tomorrow? Like, seriously?” (Laughing)
Stynes: Come back tomorrow.
Atem: Just not right now, please. And I have said stuff like that, and it's just like (mumbling) (Laughing) Like what do you say to that? It’s like this person’s unhinged and will injure them more than I will injure them so I’m just going to leave it be.
(Music sting)
