Every Inch: the bureaucratic effect in colonisation 2022

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The exhibition Every Inch: the bureaucratic effect in colonisation seeks to make legible the role of administrative and media systems in colonial process. Stemming from Alana Hunt's pursuit of legislation that permits the destruction of Indigenous cultural heritage, the exhibition considers the operation of bureaucracy in local, national and global contexts. Informed by the possibilities of friendship, Every Inch engenders a field of connection across localities in Australia and India subject to the violence and absurdities of development and modernity.

In this exhibition, Kush Badhwar responds to the construction of the Navi Mumbai International Airport and the sweeping aside of the city's residents and their existing cultural infrastructure. Sohrab Hura deflates the Modi government's increasingly sinister use of social media to advance religious fundamentalism. Painting by Gija artists Mabel Juli and Mr R Peters transcends Alana Hunt's images of a granite mining camp abandoned after the halting of illegal mining on Country. In an accompanying video Hunt chronicles the 967 applications made under the WA Aboriginal Heritage Act (Section 18) (1972, 2021) between 2010-20 'to destroy, damage or alter an Aboriginal site'. Of the 3300 applications since 1972, only three have been declined. A fourth site, The Cross Art Projects, presents the exhibition as part of the gallery's history of championing activism in metropolitan, regional and remote contexts.