Rebecca Ann Hobbs [New Zeland]
“Ah-round” | video
venue: 9 Szafarnia Str., fasade of Gdansk Hotel
This work is founded on my research into Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism. Of particular interest to me is the idea of the active subject. It was important that Madou was actively negotiating the situation, an autonomous being. Whilst the camera position and pace implicates the viewer as they look in on his. I also investigated Marcus Garvey’s work and ideologies when preparing to make this work. Garvey was an advocate of Pan-Africanism and he established a shipping company, the Black Star Line. The BSL functioned as a business, as Garvey believed that empowerment could be achieved via financial security, it was also a strategy to move people who were victims of the diaspora back to Africa, the Motherland. Financially, the BSL failed in the end, but the power of Garvey’s ideas have remained. The 360-degree camera movement of Ah-round presents the idea of moving full circle and pays tribute to Garvey’s BSL ambitions. The song that Madou is listening to is “Traveling,” by Burning Spear, from the album “Spear Burning.”
Rebecca Ann Hobbs knowingly plays with notions of the “Noble Savage” in her lyrical work Ah-round in which the camera slowly circles a dark-skinned man watering tropical plants. New Zealand artists have a particular relationship to such notions with their nation being founded in the last phase of European colonialism, during the 19th Century; and now working through the concrete dilemmas of post-colonialism in the form of indigenous rights issues. As Hobbs’ video suggests, the field is multi-layered and complex; a dance of the real, imagined, feared, original, copied and regenerated. Ah-round does not attempt to trivialise these matters with its romantic beauty; but instead creates an image onto which our own projections of what we could more broadly consider as the “Exotic Other” (servant, master, dancer, lover, hunter, itinerant, infiltrator, migrant, terrorist) can be played out and immediately undone as suspect and often silly.
Rebecca Ann Hobbs (born 1976 in Queensland, Australia) is a South Auckland based, New Zealand artist who maintains an art practice with moving and still images. Hobbs has always been interested in notions of the absurd, but is currently fascinated with specific dance practices and public spaces of South Auckland, New Zealand. Hobbs completed her BFA at the Victorian College of the Arts in 2002 and a MFA at the California Institute of the Arts in 2005. Hobbs is currently academic staff in the Faculty of Creative Arts at the Manukau Institute of Technology, Otara, New Zealand. Hobbs’ bibliography includes: Ema Tavola, Artist Profile//Rebecca Hobbs, Eyeline Magazine, Issue #74, 2011, Brisbane, Australia.
