ART AND HUMAN RIGHTS:
WITNESSING TO SILENCE

JUAN DAVILA

Drill Hall Gallery

Juan Davila was born 1946 in Santiago, Chile. He moved to Australia in 1974 and now lives in Melbourne. He is one of Australia's most respected and creative artists, represented in all State and National art museums, an editor for the Art and Criticism Monograph Series (Melbourne), and Member of the Committee of Revista de Critica Cultural in Santiago, Chile. Davila's varied education includes studies undertaken at the Colegio Verbo Divino Santiago, (1961-63), the Law School of the University of Chile (1965-69), and the Fine Arts School of the University of Chile (1970-72).

In the 1970s his work had an immediate impact on the Australian art scene. In the last three decades he has continued to explore the role of art in social and political contexts, passionately advocating the need for art to address and debate issues of social and political significance.

In 2002 his solo exhibition at Kalli Rolfe Contemporary Art, Melbourne, entitled Woomera, looked at the Australian detention centre and the treatment of refugees. The Drill Gallery, Australian National University presented a survey exhibition of his work from 1988-2002 in the same year as part of the Latin American theme at the Humanities Research Centre, ANU. This exhibition included work referencing Latin America and Australia, through the images of what he described as 'the half-caste itinerant in Chile- a so-called terrorist' and 'the refugee in Australia'.

In the catalogue, Davila stated: "Even most of our intellectuals today seem unable to formulate an idea of the nation we want, so facilitating the current culture of indifference to the reductionism under which we live. We seem to have lost the capacity to relate to any other culture or being but the Western one….Social issues, disturbance, difference, misery, madness and strangeness are silenced by emphasizing in the other only that which resembles us, or by distancing the other and its desire as alien, thus erasing the capacity of anyone to address or challenge us…”

For Witnessing to silence Davila has prepared a new work - a painting installation that explores a number of critical issues and themes related to political and social rights in an international context.

Juan Davila
Panorama of Santiago, Chile: 1973-2003 (detail)
2003
Oil on canvas
© Kalli Rolfe Contemporary ArtCopyright Agent
Photograph: Alan Morgans

© Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, 2003

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Last Modified: Wed. 30 July 2003