Artist talk with Sharifah Emalia Al-Gadrie: 5pm, Friday 16 February

Opening: 5.30pm, Friday 16 February

Contemporary Art Tasmania

A Dance Retold, brings together two films by moving image artist Leyla Stevens that proposes a retelling of Balinese art histories through a matrilineal lens.

Using dance as a narration device, the exhibition invokes the presence of disciples, muses, and mothers made marginal or deviant within colonial and patriarchal interpretations of Bali’s art canon. Focusing upon the somatic instruction that occurs between the dance teacher and her students, both films imagine the dance rehearsal as a feminist ancestral space, where a matrilineal building and passing of knowledge occurs.

For the exhibition at CAT, two moving image artworks are shown together for the first time, conceived as two acts or iterations of shared research themes:

Patiwangi, the death of fragrance (2021) is in response to the work of Balinese women artists housed in Australian museums and how women are often made absent in these collection records. Parallel to this enquiry, the film draws upon overlooked biographies of female dancers who acted as muses to European painters during Bali’s late colonial period. The resulting two channel film constructs a speculative archive, connecting disparate disciplines, spaces and temporalities, as a way to re-think whose lineages are being told within the space of the museum collection and who gets to do the telling.

GROH GOH (Rehearsal for Rangda) (2023) re-imagines performance lineages surrounding the mythological figure of the Rangda: Bali’s queen of the graveyard and patroness of black magic. The story of Rangda, and her alter incarnation, the legendary witch widow Calonarang, occupies a central role within Bali’s spirit cosmology and frames a narrative around an undesirable woman as a dangerous and deviant social disrupter. Alongside her feared otherness, Rangda is conceived as a balancing force for spiritual order, and a powerful matriarchal protector. The film centres upon a group of Rangda’s disciples (léaks) as they learn how to perform Rangda, a character that is traditionally performed by men. In the final scene, a contemporary manifestation of Rangda appears, channelling her voice as an extreme metal vocal performance.