The Violence of Denial: Genevieve Grieves in conversation with Vicki Couzens and Julie Gough

Worimi researcher, curator, artist and filmmaker, Genevieve Grieves, curated an exhibition in 2017, The Violence of Denial, at Arts House for Yirramboi First Nations arts festival based in Naarm (Melbourne). The exhibition showcased female and non-binary First Nations artists who work with screen-based media to disclose Australia’s violent colonial past. The artists featured in the exhibition—Dianne Jones, Vicki Couzens, Julie Gough and r e a—are all engaged in regenerative acts of reviving First Peoples memory, story, culture and connection to Country to actively disrupt repressive settler colonial systems that refuse the violence of colonial occupation and erase First Peoples. Part I of this volume features three edited transcripts from the public talks program that took place during The Violence of Denial exhibition, that produced insightful conversations between Grieves and the participating artists, as well as Koori historian, academic and writer, Tony Birch. The transcripts reveal how artists resist colonial amnesia and engage in truth-telling through creative practice, while at the same time acknowledging the emotional cost of engaging in such memorial acts. In this first transcript, Genevieve Grieves yarns with artists Julie Gough (Trawlwoolway) and Vicki Couzens (Gunditjmara).