PERFORMING TEXTILES
Kawita Vatanajyankur
Presented in partnership with Alcaston Gallery, Melbourne
October 17 – November 10, 2018
Antidote Projects is proud to present the Australian premiere of Performing Textiles, Vatanajyankur’s acclaimed video and print series, which will also show concurrently at the inaugural 2018 Bangkok Art Biennale in 2018.
Kawita Vatanajyankur’s work has been described as “alluring, thought-provoking and centred on making visible the invisible workforce with an acute sense of social justice”. The artist uses her video work to explore the value and understanding of manual domestic labour.
During a residency at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Vatanajyankur’s output expanded on her interest in labour and the workforce, with particular focus on the processes of wool production in New Zealand. In Performing Textiles, the artist physically embodies the machinery and techniques used to manufacture textiles – she is a skein of fibres dipped into red dye; she is a spinning wheel creating thread; and she is a shuttle, weaving fabric on a loom.
Presented through the double-lens of a hyper-coloured formal composition, the work becomes a study of the physical abilities and vulnerabilities of the body to accommodate the demands of labour. In this, the suite of video works and resulting images interrogate questions of labour, consumption, feminism and the artist’s lived experience