Art, Race and Discomfort: A Conversation about Invisible Labour with Haneen Mahmood Martin

Can you tell me about your experiences working as a woman of colour in the regional arts industry? And what kind of invisible labour do you perform?  

Living regionally and in a metro area is similar, except you have more access to resources and peers in the latter. If you are in a bigger metro area, you have more people like you around the place, which makes things a lot easier in that sense. But, if you look at the statistics, we also know that there aren’t too many of us (who identify as BIPOC) in the arts, regardless of where we live [5]. So, it is a bit of a numbers game wherever you are. And I focus on numbers as I think they’re key when trying to instigate change, and not having a community to create that change is draining. So, invisible labour comes into play when that communal support isn’t within an institution. My invisible labour is often about pushing and prodding organisations to do better and looking more closely at the mechanisms maintaining racial inequality. How do you convince people who don’t have a lived experience of discrimination and who have been in the same job for twenty years to do things radically differently? How do you create this change from a regional context, where you’re severely underfunded and under-resourced? How do you elicit change when there’s no willingness to take a risk, at least occasionally? Most of our invisible labour goes toward explaining to cultural leaders and institutions why something they’ve been doing for twenty-five years is problematic and getting people on our side instead of putting them off. 

What about the difference between working in an arts organisation in regional Australia and one in a metropolitan area? What additional invisible labour is there that we might not be conscious of?

While it’s not technically part of my role, I spend a lot of time charging up people’s power cards—people who live remotely—because they need to call us. I do lots of cultural liaising, which is an essential, even if informal, part of doing business. Many people also walk in for cups of tea and things like that. I want to be there with them, so sometimes I don’t quite get to my emails. That’s one way in which it’s different in the regional areas. It is slower. You can’t rush certain things, which does not necessarily reflect how keen people are to do something. It’s part of the reality of working with remote communities.

Another form of invisible labour emerges when metropolitan spaces don’t do their homework or legwork.Metropolitan-based spaces offer our regional artists many opportunities, but they are marketed and communicated poorly. For example, metro organisations may offer our artists a travel subsidy to attend a conference, but they won’t have done the community outreach work. Often, they will go through an organisation like ours to reach out to people. So we are left with trying to articulate to the community why this opportunity is important, why people should attend the information session, and why they should bother with this. You can make a decent living as an artist in the Northern Territory, and I think sometimes people forget that we don’t always need to look to the metro areas for opportunities. A lot is happening here and on impressive national and international scales.

But, in saying that, we feel pressure to make sure that people turn out, apply for these opportunities, have their voices heard, etc. But what happens when people lose interest in the regions? It is cool to start paying attention right now, but what happens when there is insufficient uptake because the arts institutions didn’t do the invisible work? 

Something I try to do is communicate the responsibility one feels as a woman of colour to support our peers no matter what and how that results in invisible labour. How bad would I feel if I didn’t pass on that national opportunity to a bunch of people? How selfish would I be when it shouldn’t have been my responsibility in the first place?

It has been powerful to understand how systems exploit me and make me feel unwelcome in the arts and then ask: How do I create change?

So, how does change happen? And how does invisible labour stop being unseen?

Organisations must shift their operations to reflect Australia’s diverse population; otherwise, institutional change will remain relegated to invisible labour. To use one example, we will never be able to explain what it feels like when someone holds their handbag a bit too tight around you at an art opening. It’s tricky to explain those nuances and microaggressions to people who are not of colour.

And it is great when programming shifts in an institution to include more diverse artists, but what does it mean when non-white audiences don’t feel welcome? On this front, Australia is moving slowly. I think the way many spaces operate is still voyeuristic. Their approach is something like: we’re just going to watch people do their ‘cultural’ thing, and that’s our big tick in a box. But we haven’t asked who is missing in the room. I think quite a few cultural leaders and organisations are paying attention to this issue and want to make that change happen. They are doing so through more significant risks in their programming and more engaged community programs that mean something to the communities they are trying to reach. Some self-determined groups I’d love to mention here are Saluhan, Yo Soy and We Eatin’ Good. Some organisations and cultural leaders doing good work are Contemporary Asian Australian Performance, which has been exploring the dynamics of regional touring and Asian Diaspora audiences, and Hannah Illingworth, the Director of Darwin Fringe Festival, who embeds care into programming via a No TRAASH (no transphobia, racism, ableism, ageism, sexism, homophobia) policy into an open access festival.

Are there other examples of invisible labour you’d like to share concerning working in the arts industry?

Many people still don’t know how to act around people of colour, and that’s a big issue. I think there’s also labour in the push and pull of being in the mindset of thinking: Okay, this is my opportunity to try maybe and create institutional change here, but how do I do that when nobody else in the room is experiencing the same thing? How do I do it so it doesn’t look like I’m just being emotional, weak, whiny or that I don’t have thick enough skin? I have had many situations where I will have colleagues say something like: I heard ‘so and so’ couldn’t pronounce your name; how wild and how annoying is that? But really, that is part of my existence in the world. That’s not worth talking about right now. Yes, that is a small part of what it means to me to leave the house and talk to anyone: performing invisible labour, educating. But it’s not my main ambition. In addition, I’m Muslim, so getting things like cultural leave for religious events built into my contracts is labour. There is much work in constantly asking yourself, do I say something? Do I not say something? How does that impact everyone who comes after me? It’s constant. 

Do you think this invisible labour also comes from living in a country like Australia, which through colonisation has been built on a system that serves individualism, whereas we come from nations where the collectives and the community’s success is also our own? Essentially, we come from communities where we must think about everybody else.

Definitely. I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had where I have tried to articulate to white people the pressure to be accountable to others. Some people don’t realise how much we think about the legacies we leave behind for others and how important it is for us to have walked through the door in the first place.

As a final topic, I wanted to reflect on the role of writing and research in advancing structural change. As I did background research for this dialogue, I found there wasn’t much academic literature on invisible labour specific to the context of BIPOC arts workers in Australia. But I know that the university has been crucial for many of us to help articulate racism within the arts in this country. For example, your studies at NIDA to achieve a Master of Fine Arts (Cultural Leadership) have been generative for you. 

Studying gave me many tools to explain the racism and discomfort I feel at art events or working in the arts. Studying gives me a sense that I could try and change the systems, including the language used to describe art, collections, policy, etc. – because I realised that the more I talked about skills, race and discomfort, the more I could change the conversation. Part of our invisible labour, or unacknowledged work, as art workers is to research and think about how institutions can operate differently. 

Absolutely, Haneen, and at least through projects like Parallel Conversations, there’s some recognition of this often invisible labour. Such labour is essential for structural change, whether in regional or metropolitical museums (both of which have inherited the colonial logic of Western thinking). Sometimes, we feel we must perform invisible labour for our community, especially if we are the first or only bla(c)k, Indigenous people of colour in art spaces. Ultimately, invisible labour is a gift, even if sometimes it is not acknowledged. But even if not accounted for or respected, invisible labour is also the gift that keeps giving.