Hayley Millar Baker No Spectacular Soul

Artspace is proud to present a major solo commission by Hayley Millar Baker, a Gunditjmara / Djab Wurrung / Taungurung artist, whose distinctive lens-based practice is grounded in Aboriginal understandings of relationality and has long been concerned with the ethics of looking.

Drawing on critiques of moral spectacle, No Spectacular Soul is a multi-screen video installation that critiques the moral and aesthetic conditions under which dignity and protection are granted or withheld. At its core is the unsettling condition that humanity is not presumed; it must be performed correctly.

The work considers how systems of power shape the terms on which lives become defendable, grievable and worthy of protection.

Its concern is not simply who receives protection, but why protection has become contingent upon moral performance, and how regimes of grievability can determine in advance whether suffering or resistance will register as human, political, or dangerous.