Steven Rhall: ABORIGINAL LAND (SSID)

4 December 2021 – 20 March 2022

ABORIGINAL LAND: SSID 2021 by interdisciplinary Taungurung artist Steven Rhall is an ingenious new public artwork conceived for presentation using wireless networks of ACCA and those across the city and beyond. Interfacing with the public through the personal space of mobile phones and other networked devices, Rhall’s project is simple in form yet weighty in meaning and significance. Underpinning the work is the gesture of renaming wireless network identifications (or SSIDs) to ‘ABORIGINAL LAND’, both on the artist’s own device/s and those of the institution, as well as via a participating public, viewable to anyone within a reachable distance to these networks.

Rhall’s work takes the form of a digital work distributed through the ether, which identifies and claims digital space as Aboriginal Land, expanding our conception of sovereign Country from the lateral space of land and waterways to the vertically integrated and dispersed space of sky, space, and the virtual realm. As Rhall suggests: ‘This artwork has a direct connotation to Aboriginal Land being everywhere, not just the imagined, reified and sometimes constructed romanticised space.’

Rhall’s project cleverly adopts, adapts and intervenes in a series of aesthetic regimes and technical, political economies: the strategic, bureaucratic aesthetic of conceptual art; the digital space of Wi-Fi networks and the internet; the legal and regulatory frameworks of telecommunications – and land rights. ABORIGINAL LAND: SSID playfully adapts the guerrilla tactics of contemporary activism, ingeniously inserting itself through telecommunications networks mapped across the city. As Rhall notes, ‘Appearing on a device, uninvited and unmediated, ABORIGINAL LAND: SSID asserts the sovereignty that, for the main, has been buried by numerous forms of institutional bureaucracy; cutting through like a stark reminder, or notification.’ It also calls upon the local citizenry to act as allies by offering up their handheld devices and other connected networks to the reception and identification of ‘ABORIGINAL LAND’.

Steven Rhall is represented by MARS Gallery, Melbourne, lectures at the Victorian College of the Arts and is a PhD candidate at Monash University on Birrarung-ga land (Melbourne).

An element of this project will be presented at ACCA, in the Project Space: The Hoarding over the duration of the exhibition.