As an artist, making sense of the world can include re-speaking painful words used by those in power. By placing these words in new temporal and material contexts, artists test the limits of the speakers’ logic. Campaign slogans are unveiled as self-serving rhetoric. Aggressive posturing lets slip the racist colonising framework beneath. We might wonder what year these words where said, last year or 40 years ago? We might check ourselves: haven’t we changed? Surely no one still thinks like that?

In her work, Kait James’ questioning of shifts in attitudes across time is manifested by her use, and remaking, of tourist souvenirs. Her practice has focused on using calendar and location tea towels that include generic or stereotyped depictions of Indigenous Australians and their works of art. Encountering these prosaic objects from the ’70s and ’80s anew is confronting enough, however James combines these found objects with events and symbols to remind us that colonisation is ongoing. We might have changed the décor but not the foundational title.

Recently, James has started to work with other tourist memorabilia, including the felt triangular pennants of places and tourist icons. Not much fits on these small flags. Complex sites and histories are reduced to the town name and a generic symbol, often the same leaping fish for any beach or river town. Nevertheless, they hold totemic power, like little fan flags of a favoured holiday town. Part of their nostalgic appeal is the low-tech production, which doesn’t hide how they were made – a single screen print in heavy white paint with florescent highlights, a ribbon sewn along one edge with extra length so they can be tied or pinned onto a wall. We use souvenirs to remember where we have been. James re-works this flag form and inserts Indigenous place names. We are reminded that in the past, just as now, we didn’t see everything – some stories weren’t told, and some are still being erased. Her flag for Ararat has an image of tree stumps and a road sign, a reference to the recently destroyed and vandalised sacred trees of the Dja Dja Warrung.

Indigenous and feminist artists in Australia have led the way in using everyday objects to critique power relations and gender politics. These include Destiny Deacon and Karla Dickens’ statements of sovereignty in the face of historic and contemporary racism; Sarah Goffman’s explorations of tourist kitsch, material culture and waste; and Nell and Sarah Contos’ entwining of identity, fashion and music. While James’ practice connects to these broad studio approaches, materiality and concerns, she brings her own particular set of cultural and aesthetic references. In particular, her work draws on the lyrics, symbols and attitudes of dance music and from the ’80s and ’90s. She doesn’t mine obscure tracks to give her work the aura of cool; rather she quotes dance anthems still in rotation, those that transport us to another time: Yothu Yindi’s ‘Treaty’, David Bowie’s ‘Let’s Dance’, KLF’s ‘Justified & Ancient’ and, in a new work, Kylie Minogue’s first Stock Aitken Waterman single from 1987 – ‘Lucky’. The title of this last one is enough to start the earworm.

Do you remember that song and video clip? A young Kylie, fresh from Neighbours, dancing around an apartment in multiple outfits staring at a picture of a young man. She was ‘lucky’ not only in looks but also in timing – late ’80s jingoistic nationalism wanted a suburban girl to make it big. James revisits this moment with subversive power, using the song title in a large, tufted, textile ‘painting’, rendering the word in blue and white check, like crime-scene police tape. What makes you lucky? That you have an apartment? That it’s not been wrapped in police tape? That the man in the picture is not dead? James’ work makes me think again about the summer of ’87–’88, when this bubble gum pop song played continuously. It was the bicentenary of Australia – a year-long celebration of the First Fleet ‘settlement’ at Warrane. The chorus of ‘Lucky’ seemed to confirm the amnesia of white culture over and over again.

Fandom has its own logic – parts come together not because of narrative sequence but through emotional connectivity. In this way, lyrics of a song might connect to the texture and colour combination of our favourite dance pants. I imagine that James had a few brightly-coloured acid house clothes that she is now channeling into her soft, tufted paintings. A song can take us back to the time we played it on high rotation, fusing personal and societal events. Music has a way of tapping into our body’s memories, so that to dance to a rhythm is to dance into being all the feelings of ‘then’. This time shift can leave us feeling disconcerted, overwhelmed with a complex rush of memories, half remembered lyrics and emotions: pleasure, joy, shame, guilt.

How might we feel encountering James’ work? Pulled in by the familiar, we become disorientated by the sense that we recognise something, but we are just not sure where from. We might also experience the uncomfortable, shameful feeling of recognising something from the past that we no longer identify with or want in our life – like locking eyes with a frenemy in a crowd, recognition kicking in before the memory of the dynamic freezes us with horror. The memory of a racist tea towel seen on the back of a friend’s toilet door – how did I feel then? Did it seem ‘normal’ and only now are we reconsidering it? Lyrics from a pop anthem lift our spirits and smiles, before the bad teenage memories send us into a shame spiral. We might remember the delight of dancing in faux-fur green and pink ’90s gear, relieved that this was all before phone cameras and social media.

Kait James is adept at playing with temporal and material displacements. This is vital work, because it allows audiences to consider their own experiences in relation to questions of national and historical significance. James’ ability to tap into nostalgic delight and destabilise the familiar prompts us to consider multiple subjectivities and moments in time.