Critical Bodies is an exhibition that presents the practices of seven early career photo and video artists: Danica Knezevic, Pamela Pirovic, Tayla Jay, Georgia Boe, David Collins, Blake Lawrence and Yiorgo Yiannopoulos. It focuses on contemporary photographic and video work along with performance and objects that place the body at the centre of investigation.
The body has been a vehicle for experimentation into all realms of human experience, including emotion, violent action, religious expression, political engagement, gender questions, and medical intervention. Many of the artists in Critical Bodies perform the body in ways that defy inscribed norms of femininity and masculinity, presenting the public body as a site of queer practice and a site of voyeurism and violence. Corporeal connections between bodies is also important. For many of the artists, connections between young and old, strong and weak, and human and animal, are made explicit.
Critical Bodies binds the work of these artists together for the first time, to demonstrate how the body continues to provide a rich source of exploration for younger generations of image makers. The exhibition was accompanied by a panel discussion to consider the pervasiveness of the body in art and therefore its locus as central to critical discourse.
