This exhibition explores renewal and the restoration of power, specifically through the lens of the body.

The pillars of art history are built on some problematic foundations – towering masterpieces with imagery rooted in Classical European traditions of male dominance, invoking a culture distrust and debasement of women, where the illegitimacy of the female viewpoint was commonplace.

This exhibition asks how art has historically helped to bake social prejudice against women into our cultural fabric, and presents a new affirmation, in the renewal and reclamation of the female body by contemporary artists.

Artists: Sandro Botticelli, Huguette Caland, Adelaide Damoah, Trulee Hall, Luciano Garbati, Artemisia Gentileschi, Frida Kahlo, Ana Mendieta, Michael Petry, Peter Paul Rubens, Ilona Szalay

Dani Marti
Songs of Surrender (2004-21) and Still life under the Stars (2021) were commissioned by Artspace, Sydney for 52 ACTIONS (22-28 February 2021).

Sound: Richard Chartier
Excerpts from ‘Variable Dimensions’ 2020 (LINE, US)

I decided to revisit a visual diary I started back in August 2004 that went on for 5 months.

I wanted to document my first morning view or encounter, my face and the intake of a new drug that had just been added to my ‘chemical cocktail’ as part of the treating of my HIV condition. There was some fear, as no more options were left to control the levels of viral load in my body.

All those images have been sitting in my hard drive since then, dormant; not re-visited nor edited.

It is only after the events of last year – 2020 – that I decided to look at them again.

The act of SELF documenting, gave the whole journey an added dimension. It allowed me to distance myself from it, but at the same time it became more tangible, as if it could almost be touched by the end of my finger tips.

A new feature to discover new work that may not have been seen widely.

A Visual Theory of the Soul, 2020

In the summer of 2020 I found out about a recently erected plaque, at the back of Wadsley Church cemetery in north Sheffield. The plaque says: “Below this grass area lie the remains of over 2,500 men, women, and children from the South Yorkshire Asylum (1872 – 1948)”. I felt the need to work with this place, as an artist that grew up with a mother who was committed to a mental asylum in Mexico City and who recently passed away.

I began my work creating a botanical logbook and recording every weed-flower that grows in the grassy area. I went to my art studio and in lockdown self-isolation closed the door for a few months. I made eight digital paintings that show what I believe to be the visual theory of those flowers’ ‘soul’. I thought that the bodies buried there would slowly turn into the soil, and then into the flowers, and into the birds and insects that feed on them. One early Sunday morning I presented the prints to the land and to the people buried there, and in situ, I offered to them these paintings as a memorial.

The Triumphal Arch of Palmyra
Roman, 3rd Century, destroyed in 2015.

A Roman-era monumental archway built during the reign of Septimus Severus, Palmyra’s Triumphal arch was part of a large ruin at Palmyra in Syria, which was destroyed by ISIL in 2015.

This 3D model was created by the Institute of Digital Archaeology from scans taken at the original site as part of a drive to preserve ruins digitally.

Exploring the artist’s interests in linear geometric patterns, technology and sci-fi, into the Light is an animated mural working across two walls and floor of a corridor creating a mesmerising otherworldly walkway, transporting the viewer to another dimension.

To coincide with the animated mural there will be a series of 4 Into The Light giclee prints to purchase via the VOMA shop.