The construction of displaced people as a threat to Australian security is set in a haze of nationalist rhetoric used by successive governments as part of the articulation of our national identity. This focus on displaced people as a security threat has seen the indefinite detention of thousands of asylum seekers seeking refuge in Australia. They have been subject to harsh living conditions raising concern from the international community who question whether the Australian government is violating international human rights protocol through its treatment of displaced people.

Through engaging with the performance art of Mike Parr, a prominent Australian artist, my paper will utilise his creative work Close the Concentration Camps to focus on the inhumanity of Australia as a host nation. Parr considered the Australian people to be generally indifferent to the suffering caused by governmental practices of exclusion and indefinite detention of asylum seekers, and his work brings into relief such concerns.

Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s concept of ‘bare-life’ as a theoretical framework, I will discuss the construction of the asylum seeker as a non-citizen and a security threat that is to be quarantined and excluded from the Australian population. I will consider how this construction is central to the Australian government’s policies and practices of indefinite detention, and how this construction further negates the suffering of those whose lives are framed by it.