Hayley Millar Baker
No Spectactular Soul

‘…art generates dialogue, empathy, investigation, reflection, relationships, and ideas that directly influence human behaviour– maybe not right away, but art stays with you and develops quietly over time.’
– Hayley Millar Baker

Artspace is proud to present a major solo commission by Hayley Millar Baker, a Gunditjmara / Djab Wurrung / Taungurung artist, whose distinctive lens-based practice is grounded in Aboriginal understandings of relationality and has long been concerned with the ethics of looking.

Drawing on critiques of moral spectacle, No Spectacular Soul is a multi-screen video installation that critiques the moral and aesthetic conditions under which dignity and protection are granted or withheld. At its core is the unsettling condition that humanity is not presumed; it must be performed correctly.

The work considers how systems of power shape the terms on which lives become defendable, grievable and worthy of protection.

Its concern is not simply who receives protection, but why protection has become contingent upon moral performance, and how regimes of grievability can determine in advance whether suffering or resistance will register as human, political, or dangerous.

The presence of a child unsettles the assumption that moral or political legibility must be mediated through adult credibility or through already recognised forms of testimony. Childhood is not separate from history or intergenerational conditions. It is one of the first ways those conditions become visible through the body.

Presented as a continuous moving-image environment, the installation offers no singular point of view. As viewers move through the work, image, sound and space remain in constant relation, resisting an authoritative perspective.

The soundscape is anchored by a spoken-word poem written by Millar Baker, through which Indigenous voices gather as a collective force, asserting the right to resistance, dignity and survival.

Rather than focusing on those required to perform humanity, No Spectacular Soul turns attention towards the conditions that make such performances necessary.