Adelaide Contemporary Experimental. 19 Mar 2025

 

Curated by Rayleen Forester and comprising the work of 11 artists, Shared Skin is an insightful selection of artworks concerning family, kinship, and community in various cultures.

 

The range and diversity of the represented cultures offer insights into the meaning and importance of family and community, and the often underacknowledged power of family and community as the primary sources of personal identity and the social constructs that shape our lives. The exhibition includes examples of how notions of family and community have changed in response to political upheaval, colonisation, migration and the influences of other cultures and political systems.

 

 Shared Skin (2025) installation view showing Atong Atem’s A Facet for Every Turn (foreground) and Marikit Santiago’s painting Apple of My Eye, Adelaide Contemporary Experimental. Photography by Sam Roberts. @samrophoto

 

One of the most powerful works in the exhibition is the documentary video Foragers by Berlin-based artist Jumana Manna who grew up in Jerusalem. Made in 2022, prior to the current conflict in Gaza, Foragers concerns the practice of foraging for certain plants used in traditional cuisine by Palestinians living in Palestine and Israel, and it shows the importance of cuisine in the preservation of a community’s cultural traditions. Foraging is banned by the Israeli authorities and Palestinian foragers are routinely prosecuted and fined when they are caught, but they defiantly continue the practice. The pretext for the ban is ecological preservation, though the ban seems arbitrary, and the story becomes a metaphor for the relationship between Palestine and Israel and the Palestinian struggle for independence and self-determination.

 

Shared Skin (2025) installation view showing a still from the video Foragers by Jumana Manna, Adelaide Contemporary Experimental.

Photography by Sam Roberts. @samrophoto

 

Netherlands-based artist Jennifer Tee’s installation includes two sets of textile works, each comprising a shroud of fibre netting adjacent to symbolically patterned pieces of fabric and other materials, and respectively entitled Mineral Pearl Pineapple cloth body; Mooning, and Transient Shroud/ Being Less Human. Each set is laid out horizontally on a low plinth.

 

On the second day of the exhibition, Jazmine Deng and Oriana Winston performed Jennifer Tee and Miri Lee’s Still Shifting, Mother Field, choreographed by Ade Suharto. In this absorbing performance, Deng and Winston, each lying on one of the plinths, move about slowly beneath Tee’s shrouds as if they are larvae growing and eventually emerging from their chrysalises, or plants becoming human lifeforms. Tee is concerned with humanity’s loss of connection to the environment and loss of spirituality, so that one’s emergence from a chrysalis might be a metaphor for spiritual transcendence.

 

Shared Skin (2025) installation view, showing Oriana Winston in Still Shifting, Mother Field,

Adelaide Contemporary Experimental.

Photography by Lana Adams

 

Dhagarri Buggi Buggilu (‘Tomorrow, a long time ago’) is a collaborative video work by Jacob Boehme, KTB (KC Taunoa Brown) and the Narungga Family Choir. The video shows drone footage of Country and a performance by the Narungga choir, and it’s intended to promote and revitalise language and the connection between the Kaurna and Narungga nations. In showing the impact of colonisation and modern society on these communities, it makes clear the crucial importance of language and connection to Country in personal and community identity.

 

Shared Skin (2025) installation view showing Dhagarri Buggi Buggilu (‘Tomorrow, a long time ago’) by Jacob Boehme, KTB and Narungga Family Choir, Adelaide Contemporary Experimental.

Photography by Sam Roberts. @samrophoto

 

Filipina-Australian artist Bhenji Ra’s installation includes a video, Biraddali dancing on the horizon and a large woven mat, entitled Jamjaraya, on which viewers are invited to sit as they watch. Ra is a cultural storyteller for her community, and she collaborated with weavers in the Philippines to produce the mat whose patterning maps the journey of three sisters, their mother and their community by depicting the indigenous motifs of the islands to which they travelled.

 

Ra’s video tells of the intergenerational transmission of a traditional dance, the Pangalay, and Ra and her dance teacher, Sitti Obeso, performed the dance at the opening of the Shared Skin exhibition. Obeso is a bearer of the Pangalay, a classical dance of the Tau’sug people. The mat, video and performance all combine to identify and pass on cultural traditions matrilineally and show that communities can evolve and adapt successfully.

 

Shared Skin (2025) installation view, Adelaide Contemporary Experimental.

Photography by Sam Roberts. @samrophoto

 

Vietnamese-American artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s video The Boat People is a fictional story of a group of children in a post-apocalyptic world who discover artefacts of past cultures and societies, a refugee crisis, a war and migrations. The girl who leads the children discovers the head of a statue in the sand and converses with it. Nguyen’s work shows how accidental discovery of historical stories and mythologies shapes people’s self-perception.

 

Shared Skin (2025) installation view, showing Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s The Boat People,

Adelaide Contemporary Experimental.

Photography by Sam Roberts. @samrophoto

 

Adnyamathanha, Luritja and Arrernte woman Juanella Donovan’s Continuum comprises small baskets under a suspended lamp, all made from traditional materials such as woven emu feathers, human hair, plant fibres, coral gumnuts and quandong seeds and ochres, and all produced collaboratively with her three daughters.

 

Ethiopian-born South Sudanese artist Atong Atem’s A Facet for Every Turn comprises six silk hangings, around 5 metres tall, printed with photographic images of women in traditional dress and in family photographs. This monumental but fragile work, which is suspended in a cylindrical formation so that viewers walk around it, considers the idea of the portrait, the documentation of traditional dress and the evolving situation of African diaspora.

 

In her catalogue essay, Forester says,

“The selected works highlight the unconscious dynamics of familial and ancestral relationships through affection, collaboration, language and learning. They propose social responsibility and present people who destabilise conventional role attributions to present their own individual life-visions as a community.”

 

This exhibition is more than a thoughtful selection of artworks curated around a theme. It’s a sociological analysis that demonstrates how society embodies a complex weave of disparate cultural constructs and familial and community connections that have evolved over generations. It surveys the forms of artistic expression that enable the articulation of concepts of familial relations and shows how artistic collaboration can maintain families and communities.

 

Chris Reid

 

Shared Skin, curated by Rayleen Forester, with artists Hana Pera Aoake (NZ), Atong Atem (AU), Jacob Boehme, KTB + the Narungga Family Choir (AU), Juanella Donovan (AU), Jared Flitcroft (NZ), Jumana Manna (GER), Tuan Andrew Nguyen (USA), Bhenji Ra (AU), Steven Rhall (AU), Marikit Santiago (AU), and Jennifer Tee (NL)

Oriana Winston and Jazmine Deng will repeat their performance at 3.00pm on 12 April.

 

When: 15 Feb to 12 Apr

Where: Adelaide Contemporary Experimental,

Lion Arts Centre, Kaurna Yarta, Adelaide

More info: https://www.ace.gallery

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Shared Skin (2025) installation view,

showing Marikit Santiago’s painting Apple of My Eye,

Adelaide Contemporary Experimental.

Photography by Sam Roberts. @samrophoto