At documenta fifteen Richard Bell’s Aboriginal Tent Embassy, a traveling artwork already touring the world since 2013, was on show on Kassel’s central Friedrichsplatz. The tent offers a public space where tales of resistance, survival, displacement, and oppression are told while also offering the opportunity to imagine a future where Aborigines and other Indigenous people can occupy an equal place in society.
The program in London also includes the work Pay the Rent II, likewise on show at documenta fifteen: in the form of a digital debt clock mounted on the facade of the Fridericianum Richard Bell calculated the reparations owed by the Australian government to Indigenous peoples accumulating from 1901. “The reason for this work is to show that it’s too expensive to play this colonization game. Don’t do it, because you’ll never be able to pay for it,” comments the artist.
