Research Output
Customised Postures, (De)colonising Gestures
  This exhibition aims to establish an interconnectivity between pictorial and thematic commonplaces of photography practice in colonial Southeast Asia and the contemporary art practice from the region. It intends to showcase how colonial photographic imagery and iconography materialise in the works of contemporary artists from and working in the region. As the title indicates, the group show will focus on the way the camera customised postures and colonised gestures of subjects in the colony and how their body language adopted and adapted with the modern technology of representation in indoor and outdoor portraiture (including military, hunting, anthropometric and post-mortem photography). The region鈥檚 shared political, economic and social conditions of colonial relations, arguably, produced common visual conventions in the photographic portraiture. The exhibition also presents how the abovementioned adaptation and adoption feature in the works of the participating artists in various mediums: painting, sculpture, drawing, multimedia installation and photography. In line with the algorithm of universal Darwinism, these works will demonstrate how contemporary artists in the region develop, replicate and mutate the Southeast Asian tradition of customised postures through variation, selection, and heredity procedures. This iconographical evolution not only transforms the vernacular of the colonial in the past to the artistic refinement in the present but also, more crucially, is an act of decolonising gestures in Southeast Asia photographic representation.

  • Date:

    19 January 2024

  • Publication Status:

    Published

  • Funders:

    Edinburgh Napier Funded

Citation

麻豆社区

Supartono, A. (2024). Customised Postures, (De)colonising Gestures. [Photography, Painting, Sculpture, Video and Installation]. 19 January 2024 - 18 April 2025

Authors

Contributors

Keywords

Photography, Southeast Asia, Colonial, Decolonial, Contemporary Art

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