Harrison Rae
'Eureka' 2025. Video, 5 CRT monitors (spray paint, pen, house paint), 62 minute loop.
Artist statement
Eureka reflects on image circulation and its potential for affecting social and political landscapes. Through the interpolation of the Eureka flag, Rae is interested in nationalism’s relationship with mythmaking. The durational performance challenges the flag's mixed history across the political spectrum through its repeated significations and erasure, while evoking the flag's history of anti-authority.
Eureka is not an attempt to reclaim the flag, it is about re-circulating the flag as an image, complicating the self-affirming historiographies of nationalism and settler colonialism. Through re-casting and re-signifying the Eureka flag onto an university institution's wall, Rae critiques the need for an uncontested narrative of the past to naturalise and legitimise present settlement, and how institutions serve these pursuits through consolidation and censorship. A recent example of this is the censorship of another flag – the Palestinian flag – in the SaVĀge K’lub group show at the National Gallery of Australia.
Photograph: Anna Kucera
Acknowledgement of Country
аIJʹÙÍø School of Art & Design stands on an important place of learning and exchange first occupied by the Bidjigal and Gadigal peoples.
We acknowledge the Bidjigal and Gadigal peoples as the Traditional Custodians of the land that our students and staff share, create and operate on. We pay our respects to Elders past and present and extend this respect to all First Nations peoples across Australia. Sovereignty has never been ceded.
