Barbara Campbell

A life size figure of Californian media heiress Patty Hearst photographed as ‘Tania’ while she was under the control of the Symbionese Liberation Army in 1974 was set up outside the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts during Barbara’s artist-in-residency there in 1995. Like a Coney Island photo booth, both passers-by and media personalities stopped by to have their Polaroid taken by Barbara and to renounce their class privileges.

In I have been given the name Tania, Barbara plays upon our desire to break with convention, to reject our pasts, to cross over, while still keeping our options open to cross back, as Patty herself did after she was finally apprehended in 1975.