ABSTRACT | Working as a racialised artist outside of the white cube is hairy. For the artist researcher embedded in settler colonial conjunctures of white nationalism, diasporic language justice, and migrant-settler art practice, moving across non-exclusive art sites and institutional contexts can be a generative approach. The study will examine state management of culture, education and critical practices in art as overlapping trajectories of whiteness in an era of financialised neoliberalism, drawing on critical theoretical and historical perspectives. The discussion considers the role of the artist contributing to a community campaign, the crossing of labours and creative experiments in accounting for these dynamics. Notions of art’s benevolent criticality, its civilising alibi and the suspended subject will frame these multivocal concerns.

Like language and education, diasporic settler artistic practices are incorporated into temporal iterations of whiteness in the settler colony. I argue the critical approaches elaborated in this thesis attempt to eschew or unsettle this continuum in contemporary art and the settler nation state. In adopting a critical approach that can be characterised as hairy and contingent, I argue a social practice of dialectical non-identity exceeding the horizon of the institutions of art can provide learnings for artistic activities oriented towards anti-coloniality and anti-racism. Discussions of three creative experiments staged across distinct modalities and compositions of voice help to tease out the conjunctural tensions of the campaign and my contributions. I argue this thesis makes conceptual and methodological contributions to artistic research and to understanding community engaged artistic practice in the settler colonial state.