Roberta Joy Rich

Roberta Joy Rich is a multi-disciplinary artist interested in critical fabulation and anarchiving as processes for unearthing silenced and emergent narratives, and in doing so, the possibilities they conjure for Black empowerment. Roberta often draws upon her lived experiences as a diaspora Southern African kaapse woman with African and Asian lineages. With a focus on communal knowledge systems, alterity, imperialism and socio-political histories, her projects explore resilience, power, memory, belonging and truth-telling. Roberta utilises text, archives, video, installation, photo-media, satire, and storytelling as platforms to interrogate constructs of race, gender, history and notions of authenticity. Her practice aims to deconstruct colonial modalities and Western singularity, while proposing empowering sites of collective self-determination.

Roberta has exhibited widely across so-called Australia as well as South Africa. Recent exhibitions include in every room; Campbelltown Arts Centre (2025), Lying Inside; Latrobe Art Institute Biannual Façade Commission (2024) and The Purple Shall Govern; Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (2023), Footscray Community Arts (2022).