I’d been planning to interview Atong Atem for weeks, but we kept forgetting or booking other things. She is one of my closest friends and collaborators and we talk about everything except work. Over lunch at my place, while we planned a girls’ trip, we finally decided to get it done. Another close friend, Fatuma, joined us partway through.
Atem leans against my kitchen counter as I chop things and begin recording. It feels like an apt setting for our conversation, as Atem’s work is about the gaze: who gets to look and who gets looked at, what changes when people on both sides of the lens know each other. At the end of this month, the Melbourne artist opens her first major solo exhibition, Passage: The Art of Atong Atem, at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV).
“I’m feeling much more calm about it,” she tells me. For months, the preparation was, as she puts it, “frenetic and chaotic”. She is most excited about the timing: the NGV Triennial opens at the end of the year, which means her work will be read alongside a global conversation.
“As an artist, there’s nothing more exciting than having conversations with other artists and having your work in conversation with other artists’ work,” she says. “The fact that there’s going to be an audience coming to see either all of triennial or specific artists’ works in the triennial and then hopefully, you know, will see my work.”
While it’s a first for her, it’s also a first for this country. Atem is the first African Australian to have a solo exhibition at the country’s biggest gallery. Her path there has been anything but linear. She tells the story of enrolling, leaving and dropping out of university degrees seven times with the delight of someone who has stopped being embarrassed by it: architecture at Newcastle, development studies at UNSW Sydney, fine art at Sydney College of the Arts, performance studies, fibre art, a brief attempt at becoming a primary-school teacher and, finally, visual art at RMIT in Melbourne. She still owes the Sydney degree “one, maybe one-and-a-half units” and “paused it to make art”.
Atem always wanted to be an artist. “I kind of romanticised art school,” she says. “We had a senior art teacher in high school who was extremely passionate. She introduced us to as much art as possible and she really advocated for us.” The teacher fought for the school to have kiln budgets so her students could fire clay, and described her own art-school years in the 1970s as something like Narnia. “I didn’t even conceptualise what it would mean for me to be in art school, but I thought about school in the way that religious people maybe think of the afterlife,” Atem says. “Like, oh, one day, but you really don’t plan for it.”
“As long as there are people like me here, this work is meant for here. Art is for everyone.”
Her parents, migrants from South Sudan, wanted her to study the “classics”: medicine, engineering, law. Atem says she loved debating. At this point, Fatuma interjects.
“I can see it,” she says. “I would not be shocked if you did arts law.”
“I thought about it,” says Atem. “But I didn’t [because] it was so popular.” She missed the near-perfect score it required. Architecture was the compromise, a career that seemed “viable and long term and somewhat stable” but still creative. The real reason, she admits, was less lofty. As an insular, nerdy teenager, she had two obsessions: the videogame The Sims, which she played until five in the morning, and the television show Grand Designs. “People think I’m joking when I say that.”
“We know you’re not,” Fatuma yells out from across the room.
She was, she now knows, a neurodivergent kid who had fluked her way to excellent grades. At university, the motivation disappeared along with her sense of worth. “I would associate university with my moral worth,” she says. “It was really hard not to take it personally.” In spite of it, she kept making work. She began exhibiting at 16 or 17, entering school art competitions and joining community shows, mostly drawings and paintings, plus performance and video. At 16, she entered a public-speaking competition and chose to analyse the Australian national anthem. “At this point in time, keep in mind, I was not yet a citizen, I was a permanent resident with my family, and Pauline Hanson was doing her thing. This is late ’90s, early 2000s. I just felt that it was really important to speak about, I suppose, racism and xenophobia in Australia as part of the structure of Australia.”
Her education in the politics of the image came largely from the internet. At 12, she was writing music reviews on blogs, driven by a love of punk and metal and a wish to be a music journalist. The scene turned out to be, disappointingly, “a very white bro space”. Tumblr led her to Afropunk, which introduced her to Black artists and thinkers from around the world. “I learnt so much, extremely radical Black politics, from the internet as a teenager in school,” she says. When she attended art history lectures at university and found them purely white and European, she had no trouble naming what she was seeing. “I was embarrassed for them. These teenagers and young adults online get it. You’re a professor. You might even have a PhD. What do you mean? How come you present that as the entirety of the history?”
Atem went looking for her own sources. Edward Said’s Orientalism became what she calls her bible. She began making work that interrogated how Black bodies were framed in painting and then in early photography, mostly ethnographic. The first photographers whose work made her feel seen in a joyful and celebratory way were West African studio portraitists such as Malick Sidibé, Seydou Keita and Philip Kwame Apagya. “It meant something to see beautiful, celebratory, joyous depictions of Black bodies,” she says.
Atem first picked up a camera while a student at RMIT and turned it on her friends. The result, the Studio Series, is staged against makeshift backdrops built to evoke the traditional photography studio. It pays homage to the West African studio photographers of the 1960s, borrowing their appetite for colour, pattern and movement. She posted the images on Tumblr and Instagram, which opened up invitations to showcase the work in New York.
She describes it as one of the most incredible experiences of her life. At 22, her work was hung alongside the work of Black artists she admired – “Zanele Muholi’s work was there!” – and people bought it. Early success, she suggests, is a gift that keeps you going: “You need those first runs on the board.” Coming home was a different story. “It was totally crickets,” she says.
Without artist-run and community spaces, she tells me, she would have had no place to show publicly. She was advised to go back to painting because photography was “not as marketable” – and yet she persisted. At the time, she took the silence as a sign that the work wasn’t for Australia. “I reject that now,” she says. “As long as there are people like me here, this work is meant for here. Art is for everyone. It’s not for Black people only, but this place doesn’t know how to read us. It reads us in a singular kind of frame.”
The decision to turn the camera on herself came out of a crisis of conscience. What did it mean to ethically photograph the Black body? It forced her to reckon with her own indoctrination. Her view of the early 2010s, when representation was treated as an end in itself and Barack Obama’s presidency was taken as proof of progress, is blunt. Even a Black person depicted by a Black artist and produced by a Black crew, she says, “is not immune to perpetuating colonialism”.
The body is where her work begins. In her text for the exhibition, she frames it as a question of mapping: if the body is terrain, who gets to be the geographer and who becomes the cartographer? Atem has described living in a “hyper visible” Black female body in a country with an unreconciled colonial history as a site of tension. In a post on Instagram she wrote that she recognises representation as “a step on the road towards liberation” but is wary of centring it alone.
Atem’s work is vital, full of colour and pattern. Her images are often described as “vibrant”, but this obscures the displacements of imperial history that lie beneath the images. Yes, her images are warm, colourful and alive with pattern, but look closely and what emerges is a body of work built on displacement and colonial history. The colour isn’t decoration: it’s a conscious rejection of the greyscale documentary register through which Black African subjects have so often been photographed.
Writer and photographer Teju Cole argues that photography is not neutral but one of the instruments of colonialism, a means of reimagining the world in order to “study, profit from and own it”. In Atem’s work, photographing herself reads as a recapturing of the gaze. It matters too that the images are made in Australia, a country with its own unfinished colonial reckoning and shaped by the same forces that dispersed South Sudan’s diaspora in the first place. That these images are made by a South Sudanese artist living here connects these painful histories and insists – in the way Keïta, Sidibé and Apagya always did – on holding that pain with joy.
Atem insists on joy. In Black culture, joy is subversive, a form of resistance: it’s a way of refusing to permit a people to be seen only through a lens of historical trauma. From the exuberance of Sidibé’s Bamako dancehalls to the defiant glamour of Harlem’s studio portraits, joy has repeatedly been mobilised as the counter archive: proof of interior life, pleasure and self-possession in the face of histories designed to deny these things. Atem works within this lineage and takes it further. Her subjects aren’t smiling to reassure the viewer and they aren’t performing resilience for anyone’s benefit. Their joy is a claim to complexity and to the right to be photographed as fully human.
Her recent work has widened the aperture, with face paint a recurring device in her portraits that forces the viewer to look beyond skin colour and the limits of constructed identities. She has taken in Indigenous knowledge systems, spirituality and fantasy and treats her own body as a canvas, adorning it with textile, paint and symbolic objects to explore inherited memory, ritual and the scars history leaves behind.
Atem tells me about a message she received on social media from a young South Sudanese student at the African Leadership Academy in Johannesburg. Luca’s African studies class had discussed her work and he wrote that he was glad his classmates could learn from his country. “And of course I cried because I’ve been Luca … I remember being a kid going to the MCA and seeing for the first time works from Yinka Shonibare, and thinking, gasp!, and that affected me so deeply because he’s a Black person … I try not to let it motivate me, because I think I owe it to people like Luca to make work that’s true to me, not to make work that is specifically responding to the lack that we have currently. My authenticity is what inspired Luca to message me.”
Atem says she lives for herself, but she is quick to underscore that she doesn’t want her work to be purely about her own self-advancement. “I really hope that it becomes cultural, that there’s a moment beyond me,” she says. “Otherwise, what’s the point? Just so that rich people can have pretty works on their wall?”
“Okay, that’s the line,” says Fatuma, closing the interview. “Now can we talk about the trip?”