Wounded bodies as sites of dissensus: acts of resistance by detained people seeking asylum, and in the performance art of Mike Parr

People seeking asylum in Australia are allotted little or no space in which to speak and to be heard within the polis. A limit point of this position is asylum seekers who have sought to arrive in Australia by boat and have been subject to policies of mandatory detention in Immigration Detention Centres since 1992. In recent history a number of artists who are not people seeking asylum within Australia have produced work in an effort to show support for asylum seekers and refugees held in mandatory detention. Many people seeking asylum have protested against their detention and one form of protest has been self-harm. This thesis reads these acts as an expression of agency which locates the body as a site of resistance. These acts of self-harm were (and are) carried out in Immigration Detention Centres, where the access of asylum seekers and refugees to the public sphere was (and is) tightly constrained by their incarceration, by government censorship and by the subsequent rendering of them as invisible within the Australian national imagination. Thus, their acts of resistance have consistently been shut down, framed as manipulative or labelled `criminal' by government officials and the mainstream media. This thesis analyses a selection of actions of self-harm by asylum seekers and refugees in Australian immigration detention over 2001-2003 and locates them as acts of politics and agency. My thesis also reads several works made during this period by Australian performance artist Mike Parr which he has framed as acts of solidarity with people in immigration detention. Parr's performance artwork 'Close the concentration camps' (2002) is the focus of a close analysis. The critical framework of the thesis is interdisciplinary. I take up Jacques Rancière's conceptualisation of dissensus as a rupture of the consensus in order to think the political. The status of the political or dissensus is deployed to conceptualise the actions of asylum seekers in detention, and of performance artists working with the body as a site of expression within and beyond the space of the gallery. I understand performance art historically and distinctly as a political art practice that disrupts the consensus, thus enacting dissensus. This argument is elaborated through a selective reading of key works and scholarship in performance art. Parr's work is situated in this context. In order to consider the specific situation of people incarcerated in Australian Immigration Detention Centres, the thesis draws on Michel Foucault¿s, Giorgio Agamben's and Judith Butler's respective framings of biopolitics, bare life and ungrievable life. I theorise Australian nationalism and whiteness with reference to Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Ghassan Hage and Suvendrini Perera. In theorising dissensus, Rancière (2010) claims that the essential part of any political dispute involves the very `politicity' of the dispute itself. On this premise, my thesis argues that contestation over the space to speak precedes all other political concerns and becomes a central point of politics. I locate this precise point at the heart of the protests by asylum seekers and in the performance art of Parr. This thesis contends that art can enact politics when it adds to the voices seeking to create a space for the politically silenced to speak and to be heard. However, this capacity of art is contingent on the direct political actions of those who are fighting for political recognition within the polis.