KB
Karen Berger
Performing Belonging/Performing Exploring
In this work I use my subjective performing body to interrogate colonisation and the hegemony of borders. Two videos juxtapose documentation of the site specific performance I created for my prize-winning Practice as Research M.A. in 2013, and recent work from my current PhD research.
Performing Belonging was staged on the Merri creek (near where I used to live) where in 1835 John Batman, Melbourne’s founder, signed a ‘treaty’ with Wurundjeri elders to ‘buy’ 600,000 acres for shirts, knives, flour etc. This negotiation was soon usurped by the colonial government. Currently, new treaty negotiations are in process. Performing Belonging investigated the border between us and the land to which we all eventually return, in particular my personal experience of visiting the mass grave of my ancestors in Lithuania. The breaking down of the border with my audience is inspired by the experience of early Europeans in Australia of being accepted as family by Indigenous people they encountered. The work concludes with me entering the earth singing the Kol Nidre, an annulling of vows sung on the Jewish Day of Atonement.
The initial provocation for my PhD project, Performing Exploring, is Australian explorers’ and settlers’ journals and their experience of crossing frontiers, ‘discovering’ lands that were actually already deeply known by the original inhabitants. The video shot for this work consists of me being ‘discovered’ in my former house, its destruction, and the creation a new home in the house I currently rent, also the banks of the Merri creek. This is layered with quotes from journal entries from two British explorer-surveyors in Australia: Captain John Stokes and Major Thomas Mitchell. The video ends with me in my garden planting native plants that were once a staple food of local people and were almost wiped out by the early settlers’ sheep.
Karen has worked in Australia, Asia, Africa and Europe as a director, musical director, performer and musician. She is particularly interested in site specific work that interrogates our historical and contemporary relationships to place. Since 2013 she has worked with the Environmental Performance Authority creating collaborative participatory works around Melbourne. Last year her company, Bowerbird Theatre, produced Lingua Botanica, using new research on plant cognition and refugees’ experiences of the healing power of gardens to explore the boundaries between the human and plant worlds. In 2016 Bowerbird’s previous show, Deceptive Threads, a personal story of immigration to Australia, won the North Carolina State University’s Khayrallah Lebanese Diaspora Prize.
Her performance studies M.A., Performing Belonging: Meetings On and In the Earth investigated meetings across cultural boundaries in Australia and Lithuania won Victoria University’s College of Arts 'Most outstanding postgraduate research’ award. She is currently a PhD candidate at Federation University.
