As a Wurundjeri woman and contemporary Indigenous artist, MacGuire is driven by the desire to reveal the truth of and change the lived experiences of Aboriginal women through her practice and in developing a sensory connection to her work. Queen of the Otherlands incorporates examples of MacGuire’s work produced as part of Otherlands including totemic objects constructed out of materials sacred to Australian Indigenous women’s practices around bodies, birth, waste and taboos. Departing from attempts to represent the abject, the work makes a significant contribution to discourses surrounding otherness, aesethetic practice and signification in that it instead performs abjection as the articulation of affect.
Within the framework of the performance and in dialogue with the physical materialisation of the artwork, objects are discussed in their 'other' cultural contexts in exchange for input from participants relating to Kristeva’s ideas of the abject and the chora. Modelling MacGuire’s own cultural protocols for sharing knowledge, the performance thus facilitates a performative and intersubjective site of exchange with participants. In doing so, the work disrupts the demarcation of object and subject that traditionally maintains the other.
Whereas the abject is typically repressed or 'othered' in order for the subject to maintain a stable identity within the symbolic, Queen of the Otherlands purposefully troubles participants' relationship with the space and constitutive signifying structures through establishing alternative gaze(s) and language(s) that mirror her own cultural experience. In doing so, the work repositions the abject as a generative yet disruptive performative process that is necessary for the continual renewal of the subject and alternative spaces of meaning-making. This performance also proposes new epistemologies that reside in the primacy of bodily material processes as they are experienced via encounter that exceed and disrupt socio-symbolic structures and enable the articulation/performance of otherwise marginalised subjectivities.
