Sriwhana Spong Considers Monuments to Oppression

“A quiet but intensely powerful exhibition at San Francisco nonprofit gallery Kadist refutes the idea that we can shed the pain of the history of oppression by turning away from it,” Charles Desmarais writes for the San Francisco Chronicle. “If These Stones Could Sing”, on view through 21 April, presents nine works including one by Auckland artist Sriwhana Spong.

“Organised by Marie Martraire, a French curator in charge of Kadist’s Asia programmes, the exhibition is meant to call attention to the human body and its prospective relationship to public monuments: soft versus hard, mobile in opposition to fixed, flexible in the face of the brittle,” Desmarais explains. “Movement and gesture are central to this poetic theme, and even the exhibition layout requires the viewer to make bodily accommodations – looking up, as if at a figure on a pedestal, turning downward as one would toward a grave.

“Spong employs dance in her video work. Her piece is the least directly engaged in the exhibition theme of monument, though the body itself is presented as a structure in the landscape, a monument to a place no longer accessible.”

Spong, who was born in 1979, graduated from Elam School of Fine Arts with a BFA in 2001.

Original article by Charles Desmarais, San Francisco Chronicle, February 7, 2018.

Photo by Kadist.