Pushpamala N, Bhayanaka (Fear) from The Navarasa suite from the Bombay Photo Studio series, 2000 – 2003. Gelatin silver photograph, 57.1 x 70.9 cm. Courtesy: the artist, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, and Cairns Art Gallery, Cairns.
Staging Oneself examines the extraordinary and creative ways in which contemporary women artists use role play, disguise, and self-portraiture to explore womanhood and female identity within the public and private spheres.
Artists represented in the exhibition are from diverse cultural backgrounds and draw on their own experiences, or broader cultural and social stereotypes, to engage with ideas and issues around gender, sexuality, self-image, traditions, race and empowerment. Using photography and new media, their self-portraits reveal a complex interpretation and understanding of female identity informed by real and imagined experiences. In so doing they seek to question and challenge preconceived or stereotypical social and cultural readings that are prescriptively used to define identity. Staging images of the self, using props, clothing, object placement, gestures and other cultural, social and gender markers are, for many artists in this exhibition, a way of codifying issues of identity to suggest a new construct for interpretation and empowerment of the female self.
Cairns Art Gallery consultant curator Julietta Park, has brought together works by fourteen artists on loan from public and private collections in Australia and overseas for inclusion in the Gallery’s Staging Oneself International Partnership Program exhibition. Staging Oneself includes photographic and multi-media works by blak/black African, Australian Aboriginal, American Indian, Samoan, Japanese and Indian artists, together with works by Irish, Filipino, American, British, Canadian and non-Indigenous Australian women artists, including Sama Alshaibi, asinnajaq, Vivienne Binns, Yuki Kihara, Tracy Moffat, Khadija Saye, Trish Morrissey, Pushpamala N., Wawi Navarroza, Dita Pepe, Julie Rrap, Tomoko Sawada, Cindy Sherman and Sage Szkabarnicki-Stuart.
