Sriwhana Spong : Ida-Ida

6 Apr-16 Jun 2019

Overview

Spike Island presents Sriwhana Spong’s largest exhibition to date outside of her native New Zealand. The exhibition includes a series of sculptures based on the traditional Balinese gamelan and a new film, shot in and around the artist’s ancestral home in Bali, Indonesia. Her new film, titled The painter-tailor (2019), constructs a family portrait from 16mm film and HD video footage collected by the artist, her relatives, and the family dog. The hook to which the film repeatedly returns is an untitled painting by Spong’s grandfather, I Gusti Made Rundu (1918–1993), which hangs in the ancestral home in Sanur, Bali. This painting, the intimate surroundings of the family compound, and her father’s memories weave a net in which fragments relating to the effects of colonisation, invasion, and tourism on image-making in Bali gather.