Patiwangi, the death of fragrance
2021 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
8:57 minutes
Leyla Stevens
Leyla Stevens’s two-channel video Patiwangi, the death of fragrance is an immersive video installation that addresses erased histories. In the left channel, set in a fine museum storage facility, art conservators unfurl and inspect modernist Balinese paintings, prints, and sculptures. In the right channel, Javanese-Australian dancers, Ade Suharto and Melanie Lane, echo each other’s movements. While the conservators’ gloved hands communicate the preciousness of the artworks, the dancers’ bodies negotiate the space of the studio; their hands maneuver and manipulate each others’ bodies, while their focused eyes slice through the air. Invoking artistic ancestors on both sides of the screen, the work’s storytelling power is located in its body language. The pair of dancers use ritual movements and gestures to evoke an embodied history of Balinese cultural practice. Their actions signal a legacy of women artists in the province’s modern art history—which is absent or often misrepresented in dominant depictions and accounts. In this work, Stevens crafts a compelling counter-narrative that locates herself in a lineage of invisible, creative women. The bodily expressions of the dancers are evidence of the alternate history that Stevens represents and documents. It is time embodied and recursive; it’s the past, present, and future of Balinese and diasporic women, compellingly synthesised into a sequence of gestures.
Leyla Stevens’s research-oriented practice engages with notions of gesture, ritual, spatiality, and transculturation through moving image and photography. Drawing upon her experience as an Australian-Balinese artist, Stevens uses a hybrid form of representation that oscillates between documentary and speculative fiction to recover and restore alternative histories previously buried or made invisible by dominant narratives. Combining documentary strategies with experimental imagery that emphasizes the body and movement, Stevens installations raise questions about her own Indonesian heritage by exploring how seemingly disparate methods of image making traverse cultural identity and the archive. Stevens has come to prominence through such immersive multi-channel video installations, including her prize-winning work Kidung/Lament (2021); an exploration of political violence in Bali, and its manifestations in contemporary social life.
Colors:
Related works sharing similar palette
» see more
© » KADIST
Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis
2022Five Hundred Twenty-Four, a single-channel video installation by Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis, features singers from over twenty Cleveland-area choirs counting numbers in an iterative process: one person sings “one”, then two people sing “two”, and so forth, to 524...
© » ARTS EQUATOR
Weekly Picks: Malaysia (19–25 Nov 2018) | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia Weekly To Do November 19, 2018 KLEX 2018: Translucence , at various locations, 22–25 Nov An independent artist-run grassroots international festival of experimental film, video art and music...
© » 1854 PHOTOGRAPHY
How can photography heal past trauma? Ask a friend - 1854 Photography Subscribe latest Agenda Bookshelf Projects Industry Insights magazine Explore ANY ANSWERS FINE ART IN THE STUDIO PARENTHOOD ART & ACTIVISM FOR THE RECORD LANDSCAPE PICTURE THIS CREATIVE BRIEF GENDER & SEXUALITY MIXED MEDIA POWER & EMPOWERMENT DOCUMENTARY HOME & BELONGING ON LOCATION PORTRAITURE DECADE OF CHANGE HUMANITY & TECHNOLOGY OPINION THEN & NOW Explore Stories latest agenda bookshelf projects theme in focus industry insights magazine ANY ANSWERS FINE ART IN THE STUDIO PARENTHOOD ART & ACTIVISM FOR THE RECORD LANDSCAPE PICTURE THIS CREATIVE BRIEF GENDER & SEXUALITY MIXED MEDIA POWER & EMPOWERMENT DOCUMENTARY HOME & BELONGING ON LOCATION PORTRAITURE DECADE OF CHANGE HUMANITY & TECHNOLOGY OPINION THEN & NOW All images © Sophie Russell-Jeffrey Collaborating with her childhood friend, Sophie Russell-Jeffrey was able to access the most difficult episodes of their past – and push her portraiture into raw new territory Sophie Russell-Jeffrey was born and raised in Towcester, a small East Midlands town of around 10,000 people where “everyone knows everyone’s business”...
Related works found in the same semantic group
» see more
© » KADIST
Citra Sasmita
2019The work Timur Merah Project 2, the harbour of restless spirit is stretched out on a full cow’s hide, replicates the Kamasan Balinese painterly language that Citra Sasmita has developed in her recent works...
© » KADIST
Independent curator Christina Linden presented Igor Grubic’s East Side Story (2006-2008), a two-channel video work that includes documentary footage from the first Gay Pride parade in Belgrade (2001) and Zagreb (2002), paired with a video of dancers in same public spaces as the parades to perform a choreography that recalls both the stand taken by demonstrators and the violent backlash from onlookers...
© » KADIST
Independent curator Christina Linden presented Igor Grubic’s East Side Story (2006-2008), a two-channel video work that includes documentary footage from the first Gay Pride parade in Belgrade (2001) and Zagreb (2002), paired with a video of dancers in same public spaces as the parades to perform a choreography that recalls both the stand taken by demonstrators and the violent backlash from onlookers...
© » ARTS EQUATOR
The Seen and Unseen: A Search For Self | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia ArtsEquator Viewpoints Claudia Dian February 25, 2020 The following review is made possible through a Critical Residency programme supported by By Carolyn Oei (638 words, 4-minute read) “Embracing life means embracing every element of dualism in it...