Where I have been since May...

For three and a half weeks, Kaleidoscope Gallery will be the home of a range of activities from diverse cultural producers.

Kicking off on opening night, the Homeland exhibition will be a mixed media collection of work that responds to the concept of homeland from a global perspective.

Cultural identity, assimilation and refugee politics will be put on the table, giving you an opportunity to meet with the artists and participate in dialogue that is so important to Australia right now.

Curated by Cassandra Toscano, artists include:

Bernardette Camenzuli
Jan Cleveringa
Ida Jaros
Mo Bot
Saffaa
Alison Ten Bohmer

There’s more to come on Sunday, 8th of September with a screening of oscar nominated Israeli-Palestinian documentary, Five Broken Cameras, followed by a lunch prepared by our wonderful artists. Guest speaker is yet to be announced!

Limited tickets to Sunday’s events are available, so please contact cassandra@kaleidoscope-gallery.com for details.

All funds go toward Kaleidoscope Gallery’s Converge Initiative – providing urban opportunities for multicultural artists from regional areas.
Home cooked meal

One thing that brings all people together, is the humble home-cooked meal.

As part of the Homeland Festival at Kaleidoscope Gallery, we have asked all participating artists to create a meal that is favoured by, or indicatve of their homeland. Something you would typically eat from a place they have thought of as 'home'.

We invite you to come along, to enjoy a beautiful banquet type meal and engaging conversation with these artists from various cultural backgrounds.

In addition to the lunch we will be holding a screening of the Oscar nominated documentary '5 Broken Cameras' by world renowned filmmaker Emad Burnat.

Entry to both the lunch and film screening by donation. All proceeds go toward Kaleidoscope Gallery's Converge Initiative - providing urban opportunities for multicultural artists from regional areas.

We may also conduct filmed interviews during the lunch, please advise if you do not wish to participate. Menu will be released Friday 6th September. (People with specific allergies please purchase with caution, we do not accept liability for reactions. NB: food will be prepared under the guidance of professional chefs)

KINDLY SUPPORTED BY CHIPPENDALE CREATIVE PRECINT, CASULA POWERHOUSE ARTS CENTRE AND LOCAL CHIPPENDALE BUSINESSES TO BE ANNOUNCED SHORTLY.

Join us at KaleidoscopeGallery HQ for a talk by Sydney-based Saudi artist, Saffaa.

As part of Homeland Festival, this talk is an exciting opportunity to find out about some of the issues at the heart of artwork being made by our exhibiting artists.

Saffaa is an MFA candidate at Sydney College of the Arts. Her art practice largely revolves around female empowerment and is aimed at dispelling myths about Saudi women and Saudi Arabia. In her talk, Saffaa discusses her ever evolving love-hate relationship with art and how her continued cultural activism has shaped and continues to shape her art practice. For more information on the artist please visit:www.saffaa.wordpress.com

Limited seats available so please RSVP only if attending. Entry by gold coin donation. All proceeds go toward Kaleidoscope Gallery’s Converge Initiative – providing urban opportunities for multicultural artists from regional areas.

The first-ever Palestinian film to be nominated for best Documentary Feature by A.M.P.A.S®, the critically-acclaimed 5 BROKEN CAMERAS is a deeply personal, first-hand account of life and non-violent resistance in Bil’in, a West Bank village surrounded by Israeli settlements.

Shot by Palestinian farmer Emad Burnat, who bought his first camera in 2005 to record the birth of his youngest son, Gibreel, the film was co-directed by Burnat and Guy Davidi, an Israeli filmmaker. Structured in chapters around the destruction of each one of Burnat’s cameras, the filmmakers’ collaboration follows one family’s evolution over five years of village upheaval.

As the years pass in front of the camera, we witness Gibreel grow from a newborn baby into a young boy who observes the world unfolding around him with the astute powers of perception that only children possess. Burnat watches from behind the lens as olive trees are bulldozed, protests intensify and lives are lost in this cinematic diary and unparalleled record of life in the West Bank.
5 BROKEN CAMERAS is a Palestinian-Israeli-French co-production.

In a collaboration between Kaleidoscope Gallery and the Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, the film will be screened at the gallery as part of the Homeland Festival. For more information visit www.kaleidoscopegallery.com

A Narratological Investigation of the Ex-Votos of Guanajuato and Real De Catorce

"We thank the sacred heart because it gave us the opportunity to have met and find happiness as a couple. Carlos and Felipe."

Like the roosting grounds of migrating swallows, holy sites all over the world are flocked with pilgrims each day, who travel remarkable distances seeking to gain the favour of their respective godheads. Similarly, devotees of Catholicism practice the tradition of offering an ex-voto. The full Latin name of ex voto suscepto translates in English to ‘from the vow made’: it is a gift that expresses supplication or demonstrates gratitude for fortunes believed to have occurred through divine intervention.

One of the most intriguing forms the ex-voto takes is a small depiction of the miraculous event, painted on canvas or tin, which includes a representation of the saint being thanked or supplicated and a short narrative describing the event. Often commissioned by local artists, the ex-voto is taken by the pilgrim to the animita, or shrine in the sanctuary where it will remain.

Though in decline in predominantly Catholic European nations, it is a tradition fervently performed in the former Spanish colonies of Latin America and the Philippines, where the ex-voto has manifested in fascinating and unique forms. I use the word ‘performed’ here, to preface the critical discussion of the role of performance in narrative psychology, which I will come to review.

An exhibition of ex-votos took place in 2012 at the Wellcome Collection in London. Containing the work of over a hundred paintings from Guanajuato and Real de Catorce, Infinitas Gracias sought to illuminate the complexity of the votive tradition in Mexico. For the tens of thousands of pilgrims who journey each year to the Sanctuary of Atotonilco in Guanajuato and Real de Catorce’s Sanctuary of the Immaculate Conception, the power of the ex-voto is as real as the faith that leads them there. That faith is rooted in a rich history of storytelling that predates Biblical narrative.

Despite centuries of Spanish colonisation, the animism of Aztec and Mayan culture in Mexico today is indivisible from the dominant Catholic culture. The colour, chaos and festivity of Mexican ceremony, so unlike the sombre Christian ritual, are evident expressions of pre-Columbian heritage, but also indicate what Spence calls the ‘narrativisation of an experience’, without which both the individual and the collective may suffer a ‘traumatic lapse of meaning’.

In Marc Auge’s Non Places: An Introduction to the Anthropology of Supermodernity, a home-plus is described as a tool of mediation: by adding local flavour to an introduced custom, the home-plus presents an avenue through which foreign concepts can flow more readily, but more importantly gives actants the agency of reinterpreting the colonizer-culture. Over the course of three centuries, the ex-voto has quite splendidly been home-plussed by its Mexican constituents, in that it not only reimagines the local context of the religious offering but also the relationship that an individual has with the church.

The depiction of holy entities in the same room as humble worshippers, along with the candid nature with which pilgrims address them, serve to demonstrate a sense of ownership over the space that is the church and describe a relationship with the divine that is at once public and intimate. By quite literally creating one’s own narrative, partitioning allows the church to become a realm of self-authorship, sanctioning the actant to become an active agent, thereby creating the potential for them to improve their circumstances. Turner noted an association between ‘the sacred narrative corpus and ritualistic resolution of social conflict.’ Similarly, Kotre and Schafer have both argued that the role of narrative achieves a similar purpose, in assisting individuals to overcome trauma.

Campos highlights how faith in miracles and the role of religion in times of crisis is a critical coping mechanism for low-income Mexicans, whose lives are frequently interrupted by social and economic difficulty. She argues that the reason why health-related issues are such a common feature of the ex-voto is because the majority of Mexicans live without access to modern healthcare facilities.

For Campos, the pilgrims’ participation in ex-voto offering reaffirms for them the power of the images, working as a kind of group therapy that can give participants the hope they need to deal with crisis or recover from illness. Operating in both cognitive and ethogenic modes, pilgrims use the animita as a ‘home for meaning’.

The ex-votos perform yet another interesting function; by acting as records of daily life, the ailments, disturbances, domestic and social violence that would normally be muted in the bedrock of social history are made public, their resolutions openly celebrated. This unique set of conditions allows the ex-votos to become the ‘warranting voice’ that permits these dialogues to unfold.

Moving away from the highly subjective and expressive potential of narrative, an understanding of the ex-voto in paradigmatic terms indicates a noteworthy occurrence in language, involving blame and accountability. Following on from Bruner, ‘In language, the paradigmatic favors the indicative mode, describing a world of fact, whereas the narrative uses the subjunctive mode to construct a point of view which is capable of hope and fear.’ Although having fallen out of favour with contemporary English, some linguistic devices - such as the subjunctive mode - continue to flourish in Latin languages. Another such device is the linguistic structure that allows blame to be transferred from indirect objects to direct objects. In English, we may describe the event of an accident as follows:

“I (indirect object) broke (indicative preterit verb) the vase (direct object).”

Translated into Spanish, however, the phrase “Se me ha roto el jarron” literally means:

“It (direct object) me (indirect object) it broke (present perfect verb) the jar (direct object).”


In other words, placing the indirect object at the scene where the direct object was broken, but by maintaining that “it broke”, the indirect object is safeguarded from blame. The invention of a narrative structure that reinterprets events has been discussed by Schafer, who regards such ‘visions of reality’ as indications that identity is formed by the individual’s perception of events. Yet the individual’s externalized action makes them accountable in the physical (and social) world, and it is this accountability which ultimately draws the individual back to the social discourse that frames selfhood.

In conclusion, the ex-votos of the Guanajuato and Real de Catorce sanctuaries, along with many other forms of votive offering, play a critical role in the cycle that permits individuals to act upon their desires within the framework of their belief system. That belief system in turn forms a community whose shared ideology, interaction and support allows individuals to develop the identities through which they perceive themselves and others.

Auge, Marc (1995) Non Places New York: Verso
Campos, Patricia (2011) ‘The role of faith in miracles in contemporary Mexico’. Interview from the Wellcome Collection http://www.wellcomecollection.org/whats-on/exhibitions/infinitas-gracias/exhibition-films/professor-patricia-campos.aspx
Bruner, Jerome S. (1958) `Social psychology and perception’. In E.Maccoby, T.M.Newcombe & E.L.Hartley (eds.) Readings in Social Psychology. (3rd ed.) New York: Holt
Kotre, John (1984) Outliving the Self: Generativity and the Interpretation of Lives Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press
Murray, Kevin (1995) ‘Narrative Partitioning: The ins and outs of identity construction’ in Rethinking Psychology: Volume 1 – Conceptual Foundations (ed J. Smith, R. Harre & Luk van Langenhove) Sage
Schafer, Roy (1978) Language and Insight. New Haven: Yale University Press
Spence, Donald (1986) `Narrative smoothing and clinical wisdom’ In T. S. Sarbin (ed.) Narrative Psychology: The Storied Nature of Human Conduct New York: Praeger
Turner, Victor (1980) `Social dramas and stories about them’ Critical Inquiry 7 pp. 141-68