Interoperable
Oil on canvas,150 × 200 cm, 2026
 
Artwork Statement
Interoperable begins from the condition of living within distributed violence. The work reflects on the interoperability pursued by the militaries of Australia and the United States, where political alliance becomes materially entangled with systems of warfare, extraction, and destruction.
My practice does not separate image-making from political reality. Instead, I approach painting as a site where violence can be named and made visible. The work emerges from anger at the ways contemporary power is justified through the language of order, strategy, and security, even as that order is built from the ruins of an already broken international framework.
In the context of Distributed Worlds, Interoperable speaks to how violence is dispersed across borders, systems, and institutions, yet remains connected through shared infrastructures of empire. Rather than offering distance or neutrality, the painting insists on confrontation. It asks viewers to consider what it means to live within these networks of complicity, and what forms of consciousness or refusal might still be possible.
 
Artist Bio
Tom Palmer is a Melbourne-born and based artist and revolutionary socialist. He is currently studying Fine Art at the University of Melbourne. His practice engages directly with political urgency, using painting as a means to confront structures of violence, imperial power, and ideological collapse within the contemporary world.