Beach Study
2012 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
Sriwhana Spong
Inspired by the 1934 novella Duo by the French writer Colette, Sriwhana Spong’s film Beach Study explores ideas of disappearance and the ephemeral, both physically and psychologically. In the film, a female body conducts abstract dance movements on a beach, responding to the environment that surrounds her. This particular beach was one the artist loved as a child, but today it is hardly accessible because it is in the hands of a private landowner. Shot on 16-millimeter film through colored filters, the film has intense flashes of magenta, violet, and amber, and other flickering “light leak” effects. The female body appears and disappears intermittently, creating a surreal and mysterious presence. The overall effect suggests a precarious relationship between memory and experience, transience and monumentality.
Indonesian-New Zealand artist Sriwhana Spong’s practice invests in notions of transition, memory, translation, and the relationship between public and private space, the intuitive and the cerebral, and the body and its surroundings. With a dance background, Spong has a strong interest in choreography and meaningful dialogues and communications that different art forms can generate with each other. Her performances and videos recalls forgotten pieces and reimagines indecipherable sources by dancers she admires such as George Balanchine’s lost ballet The Song of the Nightingale and Vaslav Nijinksy’s “To Mankind” diary entry. By manipulating the sequence of gestures with the traditions and techniques of filmmaking, Spong investigates how the dance movements can register particular events in our collective memories. For Spong, the medium of film is an anthropological tool of inquiry to the search of history, its narrative, construction, transmission and alternation in time and space. Recently, Spong’s practice has shifted to language and focus on the female body, especially toward a group of women mystic writers and creators. Spong questions the ideologies motivating social norms, women’s roles and how inventing a new language is linked to freedom of speech.
