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.
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