Juilee Pryor: The Army of Unrequited Dreams

The figure of the army haunts the imaginary, alternatively conjuring hope and despair. For many it can embody the most terrifying of human flows wrought on a path of hellish destruction, while for others it symbolises the righteous fury of moral redemption. Juilee Pryor’s multi-layered installation, The Army of Unrequited Dreams, captures this ambivalence and dares to merge the fantastical imaginings of childhood and war through an elaborate installation that couples the ornate details of the Victorian era with the extravagant fancies of its children’s authors like J.M. Barrie. Chillingly contemporary in its allusions to the captured and weaponised children of struggling African states from Sierra Leone to Sudan, her rag tag army of salvaged toys, brandishing weaponry, serves as an allegory for current states of war.

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Alana Hunt with Sanjay Kak: A conversation about Kashmir

Sanjay Kak Tell me about that first cup of nun chai in Kashmir, that first conversation. Were you prepared for what you were to encounter?

Alana Hunt My first cup of nun chai was actually in Delhi in the home of a Kashmiri artist friend. I initially came to Delhi, with the support of the Australia Council, as an artist in residence with the Sarai Programme, after which I pursued studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University. During my first few weeks in the city I came across a small flyer for a screening of a film about the Safar-i-Azadi (Journey to Freedom) campaign led by the pro-independence leader and former armed fighter Yasin Malik. SAR Geelani was also there, and I learnt that he had already spent several years on death row in connection with the attack on the Indian Parliament, for which he was eventually acquitted. At the same time, protesting in the streets outside were the Hindu group Roots in Kashmir, wholly opposed to the idea of Kashmiri self-determination. I was new to Delhi, but from that point confronted with the multilayered tensions surrounding India’s occupation of Kashmir. It led me to the book The Strange Case of the Attack on the Indian Parliament, and your film Jashn-e-Azadi (How we Celebrate Freedom).

Alana Hunt and Sanjay Kak