Sriwhana Spong
Sriwhana Spong | New Zeland b. 1979 | Costume for a mourner 2010 | Hard Drive (transferred from high-definition video), 8:22 mins, black and white, sound, ed. 3/3 | Purchased 2011 with funds from the John Darnell Bequest through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation | Collection: Queensland Art Gallery
Costume for a mourner 2010
Sriwhana Spong is a New Zealand based artist who works predominantly in film and video. Her work incorporates sculpture and collage in the exploration of history, its depiction and transmission across time and cultures. Narrative structures in her recordings directly or indirectly reference rituals from her Balinese heritage and investigate ideas of film as anthropological tools of inquiry.
Her film Costume for a mourner 2010 is an imagined reconstruction of a scene from the performance of Serge Diaghilev’s Les Ballets Russes series, ‘Le Chant du Rossignol (The Song of the Nightingale)’, which premiered in 1920. Spong recreated the striking black-and-white felt costume, originally designed by Henri Matisse, from archival photographs. Combined with Igor Stravinsky’s original musical score, choreography by dancer Benny Ord, Spong expresses her metaphysical concerns through the conflation of material and immaterial art forms. She states, ‘This piece is very much about distance, translation, archives and the imagined gaps between documents’.
