8:57 minutes
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.
Five 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...
Nancy Buirski, Award-Winning Documentary Filmmaker, Dies at 78 - The New York Times Movies | Nancy Buirski, Award-Winning Documentary Filmmaker, Dies at 78 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/01/movies/nancy-buirski-dead.html Share full article Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Nancy Buirski, an Emmy and Peabody Award-winning documentary filmmaker whose eye was honed as a still photographer and picture editor, died on Wednesday at her home in Manhattan...
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”...
Ong Keng Sen: Pushing the conversation | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia Articles Patricia Bateira May 6, 2020 Theatre stalwart Ong Keng Sen returns to helm Singapore theatre company TheatreWorks, after being away for a decade to complete his PhD in Performance Studies at Tisch School of the Arts in New York...
Pay and Display is a film of a performance, for which there was no audience, staged in the multistory Pershore Street car park in Birmingham, a brutalist building, arguably one of the most inhospitable environments for a musical performance...
In The Studio With Jakub Kubica: Between Minimalist Design And Sci-Fi Archeology - IGNANT Name Jakub Kubica Images Clemens Poloczek Words Marie-Louise Schmidlin With a portfolio that spans minimalist furniture, functional design objects, and futuristic artworks, the practice of Jakub Kubica meets at the intersection of various disciplines...
Podcast 65: M1 CONTACT Contemporary Dance Festival (Part 1) | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia Articles Photo: Crispian Chan September 12, 2019 Duration: 20 min Podcast host Chan Sze-Wei and guest Melissa Quek discuss works they saw at the recent M1 CONTACT Contemporary Dance Festival, specifically at the platforms DiverCity, Off Stage and M1 Open Stage...
Map of the Universe from El Cerro continues Chemi Rosado-Seijo’s long-term engagement with the community of El Cerro , a rural, working-class community living in the mountains of Naranjito, Puerto Rico...
Ukraine-Russia / Volleyball by Viktor and Sergiy Kochetov features a concrete monument of women volleyball players before the railway station in the village of Vodyanoye, Kharkiv region...
“Medium Rare”, “God or Dog” and the makings of a Singaporean monster | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia Articles Courtesy of Asian Film Archive August 26, 2019 By Alfonse Chiu (1,700 words, 7-minute read) Content warning: References to violent or disturbing behaviour In late January 1981, the body of a young girl was discovered in a brown PVC bag about a metre high by a young man in Toa Payoh...
Untitled (Wheelchair Drawing) is a ten-foot photo transfer of the image of a wheelchair with burning embers in its seat...
The video Tell me everything you saw, and what you think it means by Sin Wai Kin is from a performance series titled A View from Elsewhere...