Visual art / Am I in Your Way?, Raquel Ormella. At Canberra Contemporary, Parkes, until July 12. Reviewed by SOPHIA HALLOWAY.

Raquel Ormella extends her career-long focus on protest and resistance using mediums associated with social and political activism, such as banners, flags and printed material.

The site of Canberra Contemporary, which sits along the axis between the Australian War Memorial and Parliament House, nearby to the International Flag Display, adds to this resonance.

The most commanding work is Proposal for the 111th flag for the International Flag Display, a white banner composed of a triangle and three horizontal lines which mimic the geometry of the Palestinian flag.

A white banner raises many connotations – peace or surrender – but this banner invokes the white Paper Protests in China, where protestors held up blank A4 sheets of paper to resist censorship and the country’s harsh COVID-19 policies. A blank piece of paper offers plausible deniability for demonstrators in a country where protest is unacceptable.

Activists and artists are forced to tread a delicate balance amid fraught rhetoric, where human rights advocacy can result in censorship and accusations of antisemitism.

The banner hangs slack until someone pulls on a wire. As each person tires, the wire must be passed from person to person to keep the banner taught, speaking to the collective and continuous nature of protest.

Another white banner, Actions for peace, is emblazoned with the words “Silent Vigil for Peace”, referencing silent vigils during the Vietnam War. On Nakba Day (May 15), a day that commemorates the displacement of 700,000 Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, a new banner was affixed to the work so that it now reads “Silent Vigil for Palestine”.

Ormella draws a connecting line between conflicts across many geographies and many decades, a sobering reminder that peace can never be taken for granted.

Future history #3 takes four UN flags, stitched together and cut out to reveal the Dymaxion map by Buckminster Fuller, which depicts all continents as one nearly contiguous landmass, reducing the distortion of the relative sizes of continents. Future history #1, a banner which reads “Under New Management” has been burned with meticulous detail to retain the text and reveal the Peters map, which represents countries in their true proportion to one another.

The viewer is reminded that notions of equity between countries depend on which perspective you take, and how our worldview can be distorted by whomever is interpreting it for us. New leadership can signal change or merely distract us from unresolved structural issues.

One bomb vs many repurposes vintage postcards of the Australian-American Memorial and King George V Memorial. On the reverse, Ormella has written slogans and quotes that reference then prime minister Harold Holt’s desire to move the King George V Memorial, which blocked the sightline of the Australian War Memorial from Old Parliament House.

Holt flippantly remarked that if Australia were so unfortunate to face enemy attack, he hoped an enemy would choose their targets carefully, thereby saving the government the trouble of moving it. It was a crude reference to carpet bombing taking place in the Vietnam War, a period when Australia’s allegiances changed from one empire to another.

Am I in Your Way? is a timely and cautionary reflection in the current political moment as alliances change and once powerful institutions fall.