The Dinner Party 2013

Richard Bell’s Imagining Victory trilogy engages audiences in a difficult dialogue that seeks to challenge existing power dynamics and systematic racism, while imagining an equitable future. Across the three videos – Scratch an Aussie 2008, Broken English 2009 and The Dinner Party 2013 – Bell deploys piercing satire to raise complex and sometimes uncomfortable questions about Australian society, politics and the art world.

Political activist Gary Foley acts as Bell’s offsider throughout the series, and plays the role of First Aboriginal President of the People’s Republic of Australia in The Dinner Party. His involvement in the series invokes Foley’s real-life participation in Indigenous political history, as a strident activist and creative in Redfern in the 1970s, as well as the early days of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra.