Reparative Aesthetics: Rosângela Rennó and Fiona Pardington
Exhibition dates: Saturday 30 April 2016 – Saturday 2 July 2016
Guest curator: Professor Susan Best
How do artists represent the disempowered without evoking pity or voyeurism?
Rosângela Rennó and Fiona Pardington, artists based in the southern hemisphere (Brazil and New Zealand), take a reparative approach to this topic. Their powerful portraits are not, however, redemptive or restorative in the straightforward way one might suppose. For them, reparative aesthetics signals the capacity to assimilate the consequences of destruction and violence.
Panel Discussion
Ambivalence and The Archival Turn
2pm Saturday 7 May 2016
Join exhibiting artist Fiona Pardington, photographer, anthropologist and curator Michael Aird and artist Vernon Ah Kee, chaired by exhibition curator Professor Sue Best, as they explore the use of historical archives as sources in contemporary art that can highlight oppressive or unjust historical events, and consider how ambivalence overcomes the need to privilege aesthetics over politics or politics over aesthetics.
Image: Portrait of a life cast of Matoua Tawai, Aotearoa/New Zealand
from ‘Ahua: A beautiful hesitation’ series 2010
archival pigments on 308gsm Hahnemuhle photo rag
146 x 110cm
University of Sydney Art Collection.
Purchased with funds from the Renshaw bequest 2014.
Courtesy: Musée de l’Homme (Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle), Paris, France.