2023 Emerging Contemporaries Catalogue
You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles
YUMPU automatically turns print PDFs into web optimized ePapers that Google loves.
Gabriela Renee<br />
Australian National University<br />
Balik Kampung, Going Home… explores my cultural<br />
identity and heritage as a mixed-race woman by<br />
reconfiguring and re-contextualising photos from<br />
family archives. Embedding and layering these<br />
images within textiles that evoke the clothing made<br />
and worn by my ancestors around the world, I<br />
navigate a complex set of histories and challenge<br />
the documentary purpose of photography. Ethnically,<br />
I am of Sinhalese, Malayali, English, Shetlander,<br />
German and Irish descent. As an Australian<br />
Malaysian, the journey of uncovering this hybridity<br />
has been a deeply personal investigation of images,<br />
objects, and materials. Fabric – embroidered saris,<br />
handmade lace, and tartan – has interwoven the<br />
sensory and visual of the embodied here and now<br />
with fragments of family history. Rather than defining<br />
a fixed past or finding something that has been lost,<br />
a new set of connections to identity has been made<br />
and a future narrative discovered.<br />
Image: Gabriela Renee, Balik Lampung, Going Home, 2022. Photo: Irina Agaronyan
Change language