Sonia Harford
By 2050, Australians may know as much about Africans as they do about the Italian or Vietnamese immigrants now entrenched in a rich national culture.
Until then, artists such as Royce Ng persist in broadening our knowledge of a relatively new migrant group. Ng’s video installation Somali Peace Band brings to the Melbourne Festival poignant stories of friends separated by politics and migration.
Strange as it may now seem, white Australia once found Italians exotic when they arrived after World War II in large numbers and were quickly stereotyped by their cuisine and traditions. Perhaps in 2013 there are parallels in the small steps taken to increase our exposure to Somali culture.
Ng, an Australian artist now living in Hong Kong, admits he knew little about Somalia before this project. ”Maybe most of us just knew about the film Black Hawk Down and US army intervention in Somalia’s civil war – quite negative images. But in the past three years I’ve learnt about Somali history, and especially pre-civil war history, and that in the ’70s and ’80s there was a golden age of music, Somali funk.”
Ng’s epiphany came in 2010 when he saw Somali refugee Abdi Mohammed Abdi playing with a band in Melbourne. Having played in bands himself and studied painting and art history, his eyes and ears were alive to a new form.
”Somalia was colonised by the Italians and after independence they got all these Western influences. The tradition was a nomadic one, with an oral culture of stories. But the foreign influences brought synthesisers and also American radio, so doo-wop and R&B from the ’60s and funk like James Brown all somehow got adopted in Somalia and they came up with what I call desert funk. It has the backbone of American funk music but the vocals are an Islamic-inflected singing style.”
Transfixed by the music, Ng met Abdi and learnt about his former band mates. The Somali Peace Band was originally formed in Kenya, where the musicians lived having fled persecution at the hands of fundamentalist insurgents. Abdi and his fellow exiles kept Somali music alive in refugee camps for years, before his application for asylum was successful.
Ng told Abdi he would travel to Kenya, find his friends, and re-record vocals of the old songs. Armed with a few mobile phone numbers and names, he found Nairobi’s ”little Mogadishu” neighbourhood and tracked down some of the former band members, including singer Daacad Rashiid.
The result is a three-channel installation of footage shot in Kenya, and blended with sound and animation. The choice of video installation as a form rather than a documentary film allowed Ng to transcend politics. ”When you’re working with migrants you can’t help be somewhat politicised, but also I’m conscious I’m an artist and that’s where my skills lie. I think something suggested is always more powerful than something argued. There’s a place for straight advocacy but as an artist I contribute by creating alternative images of these communities.”
During the exhibition, Gertrude Contemporary will also host a ”social space” for Melbourne’s Somali community with cultural activities, and a discussion with Ng and human rights advocates on October 22.
Meanwhile, Ng also works with the Somali community in Hong Kong, and says similar emigre groups are found all over the world.
Somali Peace Band is at Gertrude Contemporary, October 12-26. The Somali musicians’ Aussom Band performs on October 12.
The Age is a festival partner.
Source: WA Today