A new exhibition titled Bodied opens at the Art Gallery of Western Australia on Saturday 19th December. Described as an artistic exploration of physical form, the exhibition includes video works by Gordon Bennett (AU), alongside pieces from Cheryl Donegan (US), Wong Ping (HK), Jani Ruscica (FI), and Kawita Vatanajyankur (AU/TH); and an artist book by Alin Huma (AU/RO/JP) and Cheiko Kawaguchi (JP).
Uniting this internationally diverse group of artists is the positioning of the body at the centre of their work. The human body is twisted into strange new forms, is pushed around, is looked at and desired, as each artist explores how our physical forms are shaped by the social worlds around us.
While there is humour in this exhibition, most of the works are a kind of protest, a position against unfair power structures that impact on the bodies and lives of some and not others; balancing this, others take up the problem of the expressive potential of the body in more open-ended ways.
In this way, the artists make use of the freedoms that the medium of video, in particular, has offered since the 1960s; thanks to the increased availability of technology, artists are able to set up situations that play with the capacity of the moving image and sound to act out surprising, playful and compelling scenarios that totally involve the viewer.
Bodied is curated by Rachel Ciesla, AGWA Associate Curator, Projects and Robert Cook, AGWA Curator of West Australian and Australian Art. The exhibition is only on display at AGWA from 19 December 2020 – 1 March 2021.
Source: Media Release
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