‘Bits and pieces of history’ in Fiona Foley’s Performance Photography

Australian Aboriginal artist Fiona Foley (Badtjala, b. 1964) has described her artistic process as mining “bits and pieces of history.” In addition to history, Foley has long been concerned with the performance of ethnicity in different historical moments. In her best-known work, Badtjala Woman (1996), the artist recreated an archival photograph of a Badtjala woman. By inserting her body in the place of her ancestor, she controlled her own presentation and thus repossessed her image. This practice has since shifted to Foley’s performance of ethnic identities that she does not possess. I examine two photographic series by Foley in which she performs stereotypical Native American identity (Wild Times Call, 2001) and Muslim identity by donning a burqa (Nula 4 Eva, 2009). In Wild Times Call, Foley wears a traditional Seminole dress, evoking 19th century photographs of Native Americans as noble savages. The artist connected with the affiliated Seminole nation to create the series which comments on the romanticism of Native American portrayals. In Nula 4 Eva, she places herself in the Cronulla Riots (December 11-15, 2005) wherein white residents of the beach town erupted in violent anti-Muslim riots over who belonged on the beach. While she casts herself as a Muslim woman, her Cronulla includes many Aboriginal people, whom the public has generally thought of as absent from the riots. In Foley’s works, the archive becomes unsettled, as the artist moves through time and space to imagine these moments in the context of broader histories of racism and indigeneity.