Lundi 11 Mai 2015 10:51:04 par Clarisse Treilles dans Expositions

« Work » by Kawita Vatanajyankur

In association with Head On Photo Festival, Stills is proud to present one of the most exciting new contributors to Asian-Pacific video art, Thai-Australian Kawita Vatanajyankur, and her arresting new series Work (2015).

Kawita Vatanajyankur- The Squeezers, 2015. Digital video still.
© Kawita Vatanajyankur

Endurance art has rarely been so pretty. Alluring luminous yellows, citrus greens and bubblegum pinks are distinctive of the artist’s aesthetic—a visual language of consumption and desire that speaks to a world of instant gratification and flattened complexity. However, this heightened superficiality lures you in only to confound your expectations—Vatanajyankur’s videos offer a powerful examination of the psychological, social and cultural ways of viewing and valuing women’s everyday labour.

Kawita Vatanajyankur- The Scale, 2015. Digital video still. © Kawita Vatanajyankur

In the four videos comprising Work (2015), Vatanajyankur presents an uncanny restaging of a local, fresh fruit market. Engaging the tools and tasks common to its workers, including weighing bananas, juicing oranges and precariously balancing watermelons in plastic crates, Vatanajyankur undertakes physical experiments that playfully, and often painfully, test her body’s limits. In Carrying Pole (2015), for instance, bananas are thrown into woven baskets that hang off her body, which is suspended from string like a set of scales. But as the fruits pile up, and in turn weigh her down, this scale works to gauge the artist’s physical and mental strength; a challenge that is both unavoidably compelling, and uncomfortable to watch, in—excuse the pun—equal measures.

« DeCookolisation » by James Tylor

James Tylor uses daguerreotype and wet plate photographic processes to explore complex issues of identity and cultural representation. These early forms of photography were used to document Indigenous Australian and Maori culture in the 19th century—a link that underpins Tylor’s contemporary investigations into his own Aboriginal, European and Maori descent, and Australia’s colonial past.

James Tylor- Te Aoraki, Aotearoa (Mount Cook, New Zealand), 2015.
Becquerel daguerreotype, 10 x 12.5cm. © James Tylor

In his latest series, DeCookolisation, Tylor uses the Becquerel Daguerreotype to depict places in the South Pacific that were named, by the British, in honour of Capitan James Cook. These include the highest mountain in New Zealand, a town in Northern Australia, and an island nation in the South Pacific—Mount Cook, Cooktown and the Cook Islands.

James Tylor- Gan garr, Guugu Yimithirr nation (Mount Cook National Park, Cooktown, Australia), 2015.
Becquerel daguerreotype, 10 x 12.5cm. © James Tylor

Using indigenous place names in his artwork titles, however, and finding landscape photographs instead of taking his own, Tylor challenges Cook’s reputation as a heroic ‘discoverer’. Since Aboriginal Australians and Pacific Islanders had been landowners for hundreds or thousands of years before Cook, Tylor suggests that the reality of his fame isn’t one of discovery, but of claiming them for the British Empire.