ANTIDOTE ARTISTS

Thai-Australian artist Kawita Vatanajyankur creates works that offer a powerful examination of the psychological, social and cultural challenges faced by women in relation to everyday labour. In endurance performances, Vatanajyankur undertakes physical experiments that playfully, and often painfully, test her body’s limits. These staged scenarios are both unavoidably compelling and also uncomfortable to watch. The alluring, luminous colours in Vatanajyankur’s work are distinctive of her aesthetic and tap into the visual language of a globalised and digitally networked world in which consumption and instant gratification often prevail.  In 2017, her work has been curated into ‘Islands in the Stream’ exhibition in Venice, Italy alongside the 57th Venice Biennale, Asia Triennale of Performing Arts at the Melbourne Arts Centre, as well as ‘Negotiating the Future’ curated exhibition of the Asian Art Biennial Taiwan. In 2018, She showed her works as part of the Bangkok Art Biennale 2018. Vatanajyankur has exhibited widely across Australia, as well as Asia, USA and Europe. Vatanajyankur’s work is held the National Collection of Thailand and in Museum collections including Singapore Art Museum, Dunedin Public Art Gallery (Dunedin Art Museum), Maiiam Contemporary Art Museum, as well as university collections and private collections in Australia, New Zealand, Asia, Europe and America.

Projects: Performing Textiles 2019; Performing Textiles 2018; The Balancing Act; Anthropocene.

Sarker Protick is a visual artist from Bangladesh. Protick’s works explores the materiality of time, decay, disappearance. His portraits, landscapes and photographic series engage philosophically with the specificities of personal and national histories. Incorporating detail observations and subtle gestures the works enter into personal spaces, often minimal and atmospheric.

Protick was named in British Journal of Photography’s annual ‘Ones to Watch’. He is the recipient of Joop Swart Masterclass, Magnum Foundation Fund, World Press Photo award, Australian Photobook of the Year grand prize. His work has been shown in museums, galleries and festivals including, Chobi Mela, Art Dubai, Paris Photo, Hamburg Triennial, 4A, Singapore Art Week, Dhaka Art Summit, Latvian Contemporary Museum of Photography, Noor der licht and more.

Protick is represented by East Wing Gallery. He is a faculty at Pathshala-South Asian Media Institute and co-curator at Chobi Mela International Festival of Photography.

Projects (Upcoming): Dancing with the Dead 2020.

Indian born Sydney-based artist Kirtika Kain examines how oppressive social hierarchies and power structures have been enforced upon and embodied by generations before her, from the perspective of an outsider. Excerpted from Indian historical archives, Kain incorporates the first English transcription of the implicit codes and regulations that have been lived for centuries. These rules are silkscreened repeatedly with materials that relate to themes of valuation, corporality, ritual and the manual labour of the lower classes including iron filings, gold, vermillion and bitumen. Through diverse alchemical and experimental printmaking processes, Kain attempts to transform the language and these materials into aesthetic object of value; thus, erasing, re-defining and re-imagining a personal and collective narrative. 

Kain received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2016 for which she was awarded the Bird Holcomb MFA Scholarship to complete her Masters in 2018. Since being awarded the Lloyd Rees Memorial Youth Art Award and Hornsby Art Prize (Printmaking) in 2017, Kain has been a finalist in numerous art awards including Blacktown Art Prize (2017), Gippsland Print Award (2017), Swan Hill Drawing and Print Prize (2018) and Artspace Mackay Libris Award (2018). She is represented by Roslyn Oxley Gallery.

James Nguyen is a Melbourne-based artist working with an interdisciplinary practice. His output ranges from drawing, installation, video and performance. He graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) from the National Art School, Sydney and a Masters of Fine Arts at Sydney College of Arts (SCA), University of Sydney. He has been the recipient of the Clitheroe Foundation Scholarship and the Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship. Nguyen’s video and performance practice looks at the process of making and observing art through the “performative potential of the camera”. By documenting the actual recording of footage, the camera and the act of filmmaking becomes part of the work rather than just the filmic apparatus.

Most recently James has developed work with Cement Fondue, Campbeltown Arts Centre, PACT (as part of the PACT three year residency), NextWave, ACE Open, The National 2019, and is on the artist board of WestSpace and currently a Gertrude Studio artist.

Projects: Moving Nations 2017; The Trace 2018.

Xie Rong (also known as Echo Morgan) appropriates stereotypes of ‘Chineseness’, and tropes of Chinoiserie and femininity in order to subvert them. Utilising her own body as material, she often works with text written on her skin using red lipstick, black Chinese ink, white ‘ink’ made from jasmine tea, or her own breast milk after giving birth to her second child. She mines her own experiences of childhood, family, marriage and motherhood – and those of her female ancestors – juxtaposing English narration with Chinese traditional folk song to play with her complex hybrid identity. Her work explores the territory of translation: between two languages, between gesture and stillness, between her Chinese past and English present, between performance and image.

Xie Rong studied at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute High School before moving to London, where she gained a BA in Graphic Design at Central Saint Martins and an MA in Fine Art at the Royal College of Art. Her work has been seen in the United States, United Kingdom, France, China, Sweden, Egypt, Germany, Australia and Korea.

Projects: Engender 2017. 

Jacobus Capone has rapidly earned himself a reputation for creating performative artworks that explore extreme endurance whilst deeply engaging with the landscape.  Born and based in Perth, Western Australia, Jacobus maintains a practice that incorporates performance, photography, video installation, painting and site-specific work. Characteristically evocative and poetic his work frequently combines physically demanding durational performances with majestic, sublime landscapes.

His work has been shown in a range of prestigious solo and group exhibitions, most recently at the Perth institute of contemporary art, which housed his solo exhibition ‘Forgiving night for day’ as part of the 2017 Perth international arts festival. He was included in Primavera 2017 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, ACCA’s new16, as a finalist of the 2017 Ramsay Art Prize and was the recipient of the 2017 invitational John Stringer Prize. He has participated in numerous international festivals, fellowships, and residencies and received a Bachelor of Fine Art from Edith Cowan University in 2007.