“Je est un autre” (‘I am an other’) wrote 17 year-old Arthur Rimbaud in a letter to his teacher George Izambard, inadvertently echoing Hegel’s assertion that the subjective self, the ‘I’ is constructed. Rimbaud rings truer than ever today, as technology enables us agency all over the globe, identity is fragmented, and I is an Instagram feed.
In a post-colonial, post-industrial, post-modern and even post-human era, what’s left of the exotic, the other? Long considered a synonym of ‘primitive’, exotica was the dusky bed pal of capital in the era of imperial expansion. Today, the exotic has entered the lexicon of astrophysics, referring to matter that deviates from the norm – dark matter, negative mass. Quantum otherworldliness.
The inaugural National Gallery of Victoria Triennial has no theme, but it has…
