Eugenia Raskopoulos: Vestiges of the Tongue

Publication details

Hardback
ISBN 978-0-909952-81-5
140 colour illustrations
228 pp
300 x 230 mm

Author and/or Editor name/s

Eugenia Raskopoulos

Contributors: Daniel Mudie Cunningham, Ann Finegan, Huang Du, Anneke Jaspers, Victoria Lynn, Anne Marsh, Robert Nelson, Nikos Papastergiadis, Isobel Parker Philip and Eugenia Raskopoulos with Nicholas Tsoutas

Author and/or Editor bio/s

Eugenia Raskopoulos (born 1959) is a contemporary artist notable for her photographic and video work critiquing language, processes of translation, and the body. Raskopoulos’ work has been shown in numerous Australian and International exhibitions, and was the winner of the Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Award for her work Vestiges #3, 2010. Raskopoulos was born in the Czech Republic. She migrated back to Greece in 1959 with her family, then to Australia in 1963.

Year of publication

2019

Publisher

Power Publications and Formist Editions

Abstract

With recognition for her pioneering practice long overdue, this scholarly monograph is the first survey of one of Australia’s leading photo-media artists, Eugenia Raskopoulos. Raskopoulos’ cultural background has informed more than three decades of inventive, evolving bodies of work that span across video performance, installation and photography.

Born in the Czech Republic to Greek parents before migrating from Greece to Australia in 1963, where she was introduced to English at primary school, Raskopoulos has long sustained a focused and fruitful critique of language. In Vestiges of the Tongue we see her visualising language’s slippages through performances of translation, interrogating words and their impact on the body, and tracing contemporary communication as it enters the realms of data and surveillance.

Early works such as the neon ‘No never means yes’, emblazoned on the wall of a girl’s bedroom, and the performance of the word ‘democracy’, written by the artist’s foot in urine, are just two examples from an oeuvre that, decades on, appears both consistently engaged with the politics of its time and, here reconsidered by ten leading scholars and curators, newly resonant in the social context of today.