Customised Postures, (De)colonising Gestures

Supartono, Alexander

Abstract

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’s 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.

Citation

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

• Exhibition Performance Type: Exhibition
• Start Date: Jan 19, 2024
• End Date: Apr 18, 2025
• Publication Date: Jan 19, 2024
• Deposit Date: Apr 13, 2025
• Keywords: Photography, Southeast Asia, Colonial, Decolonial, Contemporary Art
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/4238583
• External URL: https://gajahgallery.com/exhibition/customised-postures-decolonised-gestures/
• Genre: Contemporary Art