This paper focuses on the work of Indonesian multidisciplinary art group, Papermoon Puppet Theatre and its performance, *Mwathirika* (2010), a powerful contemporary representation of the injustice buried within established historical narratives and its ongoing impact across Indonesian communities. Running for approximately sixty minutes, the performance restages the history of genocide in Indonesia that commenced 30 September, 1965, resulting in the massacre of approximately one million people. Since the horrific events took place, the Indonesian military has continued to conceal its involvement in the lead up to the mass killings. Papermoon's *Mwathirika* deconstructs the history of Indonesia's 1965–66 genocide, using puppetry as a device for communicating the complexities of how the history is written, remembered, and documented. While the memory of the events is perpetually altered through ongoing political discussions, writings, and testimonies, Papermoon shows how Indonesia's volatile history can be examined through creative re-enactment in strategic ways that ethically commemorate and help to articulate the trauma of the events. Through the intersections of puppetry, silence, symbols, and intimacy, Papermoon offers alternate ways of dealing with the problem of communicating Indonesia's traumatic history.

Work by Australian artists made during time spent overseas in art colonies before returning, and the work of artists who lived in art colonies overseas and did not return has almost entirely been erased from Australian art history. Therefore the participation of Australian artists in art colonies across the world has largely remained unwritten. This paper presents an outline and framework for further work to be done on the histories of art colonies in Australian art history. It is first of all something of an exercise in an expanded art history, including those artists who should rightly be part of a more widely encompassing account of Australian art, but, more than this it proposes that the art colony as such contests the idea of a national art history: that, beyond the specifics of any particular art colony, the principle of the art colony—of artists from different countries or from different regions of the same country living and working together—challenges the assumption that modern art must come from an identifiable people and place within modern state formations. We argue that the art colony is always international or even transnational in character. Therefore the art colony in modern art might be best understood as a forerunner to contemporary art in its crossing of spatial and temporal borders and its flattening of (if not its complete doing away with) imposed hierarchies.

The removal of the monument to slave owner Edward Colston in Bristol during the Black Lives Matter uprising in 2020 did more than denounce the ongoing celebration of colonial legacies. It was a public execution to colonial mythmaking. This paper examines such colonial mythmaking in the context of the settler-colonial nation-state of Australia. By situating Thomas Woolner’s Captain Cook (1879) within the context of settler-colonial nation building to link its protection by police at the height of the 2020 BLMS protests, this paper emphasises the value of colonial monuments to the five-hundred-year history of modern colonisation. Colonial monuments in Australia serve a militarised function to narrate the lie of a just settlement on the grounds of *terra nullius* and deny First Nations sovereignty. Woolner’s sculpture, this paper argues, protects itself from the memory that the nation-state longs to forget.

The nude *Chloé* (1875), by French artist Jules Joseph Lefebvre (1836–1911), is a much-loved Melbourne cultural icon, which has hung in the Young and Jackson Hotel since 1909. From that time on *Chloé* has been the subject of controversy and mythologising, particularly in relation to the identity of the Parisian model who sat for the painting. This paper explores the untold past of *Chloé* and the reductive identities that have been inscribed on Lefebvre's artistic rendering of a nude female body. There are interesting echoes between class warfare in Paris antecedent to the artwork's creation, and *Chloé's* manifestation as mythic war maiden to generations of Australian servicemen. In 1875, France was still reverberating from its humiliating capitulation in the Franco-Prussian War, and the ensuing rise and brutal repression of the revolutionary Paris Commune by Versailles government troops that resulted in the deaths of up to 25,000 Parisians. Tensions between the bourgeois population of Paris and the proletariat, who had pinned their hopes on the Commune's egalitarian principles, festered during the period of post-war rebuilding and renewal. By interrogating the inter-class tensions in late-nineteenth-century Paris and how they may have influenced the details Lefebvre chose to reveal, and possibly conceal, this paper contributes new interpretations and understandings to one of Melbourne's most celebrated cultural icons.

Between 1997 and 2001, New York-based South Korean conceptual photographer Nikki S. Lee created a series of performative photographic works titled *Projects*. To make these works, Lee infiltrated select social and cultural groups, including drag queens, exotic dancers, yuppies, Latinos, black hip-hoppers, lesbians, senior citizens, neo-swing dancers, Japanese youth, skateboarders, Ohio trailer-park dwellers, Asian tourists and Korean schoolgirls. Lee dramatically altered her appearance through a blend of clothing, makeup, diet, hair extensions, use of hair dye and tanning salons. After transforming herself, in her own words, into someone who looks like “eighty percent of any person from whichever group,” Lee approached each chosen community with a point-and-shoot camera and announced her artistic intention of becoming a member for a short period of time. She adopted their postures, behaviours and mannerisms and joined in their everyday activities. As a record of her temporary membership, Lee asked a friend or a passer-by to take snapshots of herself in the disguise of other group members. This article draws on the theoretical works of Alison Weir, José Esteban Muñoz and Paul Gilroy in the discussion of Lee’s performative photographic works, which image and imagine identity as relational, formed and reformed via identification with diverse others. It investigates how Lee’s practice, via strategic engagement with vernacular popular cultures and stereotypical images of varied social and ethnic groups, might forge intercultural, interpersonal interactions marked by spontaneous tolerance and openness outside governmental initiatives, and provoking new reflections on one’s encounter with alterity and difference.