Fraying, dissipation, divination and talking to moths, or notation as a salve for unmanageable vulnerabilities. Propositions i & ii.
Olga Bennett
1–25 Mar 2023
This body of work emerged through my attempts to parse and read into my grandfather’s silence: his inability and reticence to share his experience of being a Soviet spy in the 1950s, and his slow silent weathering that I witnessed over the years. From there, it grew to respond to a heterogenous archive of episodes drawn from art, familial history and autobiography. A common thread of vulnerability that accompanies the experience of being silenced or otherwise unable to speak of one’s experience weaves through this archive creating a constellation of interconnected works in different media. Dancing around and transgressing the limitations of the narrative and discursive forms, the works propose different forms of notation—diagrammatic, graphic, linguistic and aural—as points of access to knowledges that are performative, iterative, dialogical and open-ended.
This exhibition at Blindside will include two out of three Propositions that together comprise this body of work, with the final Proposition to be shown at a different gallery later this year.
The creation of this work was supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship.
This body of work emerged through my attempts to parse and read into my grandfather’s silence: his inability and reticence to share his experience of being a spy in the 1950s, and his slow weathering that I witnessed over the years. From there, it grew to respond to a heterogenous archive of episodes of vulnerability—drawn from art, familial history and autobiography.
Dancing around and transgressing the limitations of the narrative and discursive forms, the works propose different forms of notation—diagrammatic, graphic, linguistic and aural—as points of access to knowledges that are performative, iterative, dialogical and open-ended.
Olga Bennett is an artist and researcher from Russia currently living and working in Narrm. She has graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Art (Honours) from the Victorian College of the Arts in 2017 and exhibited at Bus Projects, CAVES, Center for Contemporary Photography, The Substation, KINGS Artist-Run, Monash Gallery of Art, C3 Contemporary, LON and Margaret Lawrence galleries (all in Melbourne), COMA gallery (Sydney), CalArts gallery (Los Angeles) and gallery Kiitos (Japan). In 2019, Bennett completed a residency at Frans Masereel Centrum in Belgium. Her recent body of work considers how experiences of physical and emotional vulnerability are reflected in images and words.