DEBUT XIX

DEBUT XIX

An annual curated exhibition of works by recent graduates from Melbourne’s major art institutions. Celebrating its nineteenth year, DEBUT is a Blindside project committed to fostering new talent.

Gallery Artists: Ramak Bamzar, Devika Bilimoria, Christy Chudosnik, Hugh Crowley, Jordan Koudmani, WooJai Lee, Katie Paine.

Online Artists: Ming Liew, Katie Paine, Michelle Tonkin. Curators: Priya Namana & Nina Sanadze.

Saturday 22 April 2-4pm. Closing Performance by Devika Bilimoria and Christy Chudosnik.

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IN-GALLERY

Ramak Bamzar

Moustachioed Women and Rhinoplastic Girls, 2022. Photograph Series. Edition of 6, dimensions variable.

Moustachioed Women and Rhinoplastic Girls is an experimental and cultural exploration of religious dogma, gender inequality and censorship in contemporary Iran.

I use social media as a source to inspire the creation of staged portraits of contemporary Iranian women. As a counterpoint, guided by Antoin Sevruguin’s historical photographs, I recreate images of Iranian women from the 19th Century to confront the ideals of beauty as fleeting and fickle and reveal the impact of the male gaze on the face and female identity in the Middle East.

Considering the influence of Islamic fundamentalism under the Iranian theocracy on the beliefs and feelings of Iranian women, I seek to enter into a deeper understanding of the culture and behaviour of women in the Middle East. Emphasising the distinction between modern expectations and ancient traditions, I portray women's choice of fashion, appearance, and beauty to represent how the limitations and pressures of the male-oriented culture can affect the perception, self-esteem, self-image, and individual identity of women.

Drawing from theorists such as Michel Foucault and Rae Connell writing about the body, I investigate how women in Iran increasingly subject themselves to cosmetic surgery and the other forms of bodily manipulation as their bodies are heavily policed and scrutinised under the patriarchal system. By channelling visual culture and observation in social media accounts, I examine how visual culture reproduces itself in Iranian women's daily lives and pushes them toward Western beauty ideals.

Devika Bilimoria

Offerings, 2022/2023. Performance installation. Body, brass bell, bronze dice, metallic posca, copper pots, stainless steel spoons, clay cups, fruit, red kumkum, almond milk, rice, ghee, honey, flowers, songs, gestures.

KNEEL THROW NORTH GHEE HAND BACKWARDS NOISE
Instigated by pouring, throwing and placing, Offerings merges shared gestures across chance methods of art-making and ritual offerings into a live accumulative installation choreographed by an endless game of dice with materials. Stimulated by randomisation, this chance-based work is an experimental practice of indeterminacy, play and disorientation where I enact offerings performed by my body, into a void. It attempts to commune with the porous haunt of embodied intra-cultural inscriptions, matter and entangled lineages.

Offerings is a durational performance and installation articulated as a ritual-like game of dice. The work is a live task-based procedure where I generate and enact countless ‘offering scores’ throughout an allocated duration. The scores are randomised attributes derived from several categories that traverse both the secular and non-secular. In this exhibition, the materials and gestures are prompted by my elapsed experiences of the Hindu worshipping ritual pūja, but that are also of the everyday.

Christy Chudosnik

кров ніколи не висихала. воно все ще кровоточить [The blood never dried, it is still bleeding], 2022. Multimedia installation, silent film & ritual performance, acetate slides, bronze sculptures, & ritual breads (Korovai) & dried plant materials, dimensions variable.

Roots of Ukraine & diasporic time capsules: reimagined Ukrainian flag (mycelial edition), 2022. Bronze, beeswax, Ukrainian Kalyna, wheat grain, Ukrainian calendula, frankincense, pine resin, mugwort & myrrh, dimensions variable.

My practice is charged with a heightened sense of urgency to articulate the reverberations of Russia’s war in Ukraine from a diasporic perspective. These works collate materials that seek to embed stories of inter-generational resistance against Russian Colonialism and compiles footage of Russia’s current attempts to erase Ukrainian culture. Active states of ritual and memorialization offerings, mobilize works through additional gestures of performance. The site becomes saturated with stitched filmic data as a real time working response; that aims to calcify, react and evidence war crimes of the ongoing atrocities that Russia continually perpetrates against Ukraine.

Please be advised this work contains sensitive content/ imagery of war.

Hugh Crowley

Giving & Receiving, 2022. Beeswax, cyanotype on cotton, 180 x 200cm.

Cruising is a ritual of seeking a sexual partner and envisaging other ways of being. Code has always been a mode of queer survival and handkerchiefs have been used by gay men to identify each other and their erotic inclinations. The colour of the bandana signifies what the wearer is ‘into’ while the back left or right pocket implies ‘giving’ or ‘receiving’. At the heart of this exchange of queer desires, beauty exists in the potential. Giving & Receiving denotes a communion that both mourns and prays for queer pasts and futures, existing in a space of liminality.

Jordan Koudmani

Wind Sounds, 2022. Wooden box, aluminium, wire, keys, delay pedal, amplifier, dimensions variable.

This sculptural instrument relies on wind as a stochastic process, transducing movement into sound. The intermittent nature of the work implicates silence as a vital aspect of the space, directing attention to the often-ignored ambience of the room and its exterior. As sound moves through the environment, structural borders begin to dissolve, allowing even the most subtle noise to speak in the language of the sensory landscape.

WooJai Lee

In Presence, 2022. Hanji, newspaper and mixed media, dimensions variable.

This project transforms paper into sculptural objects to explore the potential of mundane materials to generate confrontations in our perceptions. Using minimal forms in a site-responsive installation, this project encourages interaction with the audience, to generate a contemplative examination of humility and intimacy of the handmade and developing appreciation of the imperfect and the neglected.

Through the manipulation of paper, this project aims to challenge the preconceptions of material, culture, and our understanding of what is ‘real’. The waste newspapers are turned into pulp and sculpted into three-dimensional artworks with texture and volume that simulates more substantial material, which confounds our expectations of the newspapers. By having these sculptures exist in repetition, as simulations of one another, yet with their individualities, it questions what we believe to be real. This project uses minimal forms to hide the artist's identity (ethnicity, culture, politics) so that the work becomes free from prejudicial interpretations and is instead experienced for its material presence in the space. Although the work can be seen as purely objective, my aim is to instil the work with subjectivity by bringing the artist's presence in the making and creating narrative through the material’s peculiarity. The repetitive and time-consuming ‘labour’ is present through the subtle irregularities, existing as eminent results of the hand-crafted, generating humble and intimate contemplation in the making. By having slight faults exist in contrast to the geometric forms, their presence is accentuated to create an appreciation for the beauty of imperfection. All these features are to exist in modesty, not screaming for attention, yet with a strong presence. This project explores the liminal spaces of contrasting ideas. The duality of the cultures and material application is explored to create not a harmonious balance but as a constant struggle to defy being categorised.

Katie Paine

Phantom Interlocutors, 2022. Artist-made hardwood table, enamel, gesso, computerised chess set, whiteboard, whiteboard marker, dimensions variable.

This body of work comprises segments of Paine’s Masters’ research titled A Spectral Congregation. The installation explores the ways in which we use systems of knowledge to perceive and understand the world and yet it tells stories that depict failed encounters. For this exhibition, two sculptural assemblages are centered around two thwarted attempts at correspondence, exploring the tenuous space for poetic possibilities within these failures.

Phantom Interlocutors: Part Two is an installation exploring how we use systems and cyphers to make sense of the world. A fabricated, automated chess set plays against itself in a nonsensical sequence: a form of divination or spectral communication. Inlaid into the table-top is a small portable computerised chess set with chess pieces set up as if mid-game. Every thirty seconds a new coordinate lights up red and a soft mechanised bleep can be heard. Ostensibly, it seems the computer may be playing a game of chess autonomously. Upon closer inspection, for those familiar with the strategies of chess, it becomes clear that this is not the case, we are simply being presented with a series of random coordinates presenting some unknown code. Perhaps this is a form of ghostly communication, a signal from something that we cannot see.