A durational gallery performance installation.
RealTime Review #65, Liz Bradshaw:
The fifth exhibit—‘live’ performers encased to their shoulders in plinths—is startlingly visceral. Representational and individual at the same time, they implicate the viewer in the colonial gaze and in the construction of identity and representation as an always-political act. Hunt and Fuata re-made themselves as bodies simultaneously of the past and the present, subjected to the objectification and ‘othering’ of exercises of power.
This inspired critique of anthropology and history lays bare the falsified objectivity that is not only an historical violence, but a personal encounter. Profoundly affecting, the work speaks of the reality of an embodied, internalised gaze through living, breathing portraits. It distills the real, the image and our ideas of representation, and quietly demonstrates why really good performance work is so powerful.
I was fortunate to see the performance during which Hunt cried, her tears leaving a wet trail on her cheek: a deeply moving moment that in turn brought tears to my eyes. It would be significant to see this work re-staged somewhere like the Museum of Sydney. It was a terrific show—I hope you saw it.
A durational gallery performance which critiques the gaze between the subject and object and references colonialist practices in museum collections. Physically, it consists of the performer as a ‘live bust’, a living exhibit.
Victoria Hunt 