ABSTRACT | Working as a racialised artist outside of the white cube is hairy. This thesis examines the entanglements between language, education, diaspora art and activism in the context of a settler colonial state. As the artist researcher of this study, the discussion considers my role contributing to a community campaign, the kinds of labours and the creative experiments working to negotiate these entanglements.

To unpack the settler colony’s fear of multilingualism and art’s capacity to address this fear, the discussion will look at the development of education and art in the transition from state multiculturalism to neoliberalism. Moreover, I look at ways artistic labour is impacted in this transition. Through critical analysis, the thesis will consider these as overlapping trajectories of whiteness, drawing on theoretical and historical perspectives.

Discussions of three creative experiments staged across distinct sites and compositions of voice help to tease out the tensions of the campaign and my contributions as an artist researcher. Like language and education, diasporic settler artistic practices can be incorporated into the project of whiteness in the settler colony. In talking through the creative experiments, I argue the adoption of artistic models and critical approaches elaborated in this thesis attempt to eschew or unsettle this orientation in contemporary art and the settler nation state. These models and approaches can be characterised as hairy and contingent. They offer evaluations of the relational labours and ethical considerations that arise when crossing institutional sites and pursuing the political aims of community organising. I argue this thesis makes conceptual and methodological contributions to artistic research and to understanding community engaged artistic practice in the settler colonial state.