Victorian College of the Arts - Research Publications
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ItemNo Preview AvailableA Detail Which Catches The Eye(Sarah Scout Presents, 2023-04-29)Sarah Scout Presents is delighted to announce Sanja Pahoki - A Detail Which Catches The Eye, an official exhibition of PHOTO 2022 International Festival of Photography. You're walking. And you don't always realize it, but you're always falling. With each step you fall forward slightly. And then catch yourself from falling. Over and over, you're falling. And then catching yourself from falling. And this is how you can be walking and falling at the same time. —Laurie Anderson ‘Walking & Falling’ In Roland Barthes book on photography, Camera Lucida, he describes the punctum as a detail which catches the eye. Some small aspect that provokes an intensely subjective response. He places this feeling in the order of loving. Barthes also describes the punctum as a wound that embodies both desire and death. For A Detail Which Catches The Eye, Pahoki presents new photographic work, videos and neons across the Sarah Scout Presents gallery spaces, exploring what it is to find oneself wounded by the gaze of another.
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ItemWritten in Light(Geelong Art Gallery, 2015)
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ItemGroundwork(RMIT Project Space, 2016)Support materials, soft furnishings evolved through conversation stemming from an interest in artists whose work can be located in a space between art and furniture and/or art and dwelling. Instead of picturing the domestic or describing the use value of art/design objects, Support material, soft furnishings attempted to collect, arrange and re-arrange a selection of works that create a tension between surface and function be that the inane, socio-political, psychological or experiential.Support material, soft furnishing uses Kati Rule’s project Site Unseen (which is permanently located in her parent’s home and inaccessible to the public) and an accompanying text by Kate Daw as a way of contextualising the exhibition and its focus around arrangement. Support material, soft furnishing uses the RMIT Project Space–which finds its form architecturally akin to that of a shop front or display warehouse–as a way of framing and re-arranging the selected artworks. During the six weeks of the exhibition, Liang Luscombe and Lisa Radford altered and re-organised the works in the exhibition to create four iterations of the project as a way of examining each work and their relation to other works through their individual and temporal arrangement.
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ItemBeing Kazimir Malevich(Sarah Scout Presents, 2016)Being Kazimir Malevich, 2016, was installed across three rooms at Sarah Scout Presents, Melbourne and represented the final outcomes of the practical research of the PhD. In the front room, playing on a small domestic monitor was a short video, ‘A message from the future’, 2016. This video began with stock drone footage from Romashkovo–2 near Nemchinovka, before cutting to drone footage of my parent’s home in Cooloola Cove. In this video, my parents play the role of time-travelling aliens with a message from the future – a message about the importance of looking after one’s eyes. The walls of the two main exhibition spaces were painted black and embellished with gold wallpaper. This wall treatment referenced both the glittering interiors of the Russian Orthodox churches I had seen during my return to St Petersburg and the dark interior of a camera. As part of the installation, a painting of myself and Kazimir was embedded into one of the walls and sealed off behind thick security glass. The composition of this painting – made in accordance with traditional egg tempera icon painting techniques – was appropriated from The Mother of God of Tenderness of the White Lake, 13th C icon painting. In the painting behind the glass, titled Tenderness of Kazimir and Me, 2016, I am painted as Kazimir Malevich’s mother, and Kazimir as the baby Jesus. Just as Walter Benjamin had identified with Kafka’s mother, I, as the Operator, recognised myself as a mother, as Kazimir’s mother. Located behind the security glass, much like the Mona Lisa, this image was kept at a distance, its aura constantly oscillating between closeness and distance. On the floor, near the icon, a small bronze sculpture was crouched upon a blue rubber mat. This bronze figure was dressed in the robes of a Russian Orthodox priest and appeared to be engaged in an act of worship. It was, in fact, a reappropriation of Downward Dog, 2006; a small bronze sculpture I had made previously, of myself doing yoga. This new iteration of the sculpture was inspired by an image I had seen of a priest praying on all fours and by how much it had reminded me of my former exercise routine. Like my mother’s exercises, my father’s crawling, and my wrestling match with my brother, the praying action takes place on the floor, near to the ground. The priest too, must hold himself up against the horizontality of the floor, the persistent pull of gravity downwards towards the flat surface. The priest was directed towards a neon sign, suspended in the liminal space of the window, the threshold of the light. The neon, ‘wow’ (seen previously in the exhibition, wow, 2016 at Kings ARI), an articulation of that which is beyond, is the light that is connected to the night, to the other night. Two other freestanding neon sculptures, inspired by Malevich’s drawings and resembling crosses and antennae were made in variations of white neon. One of the neon sculptures was placed in the light of the front room along with the ‘Message from the future’ video, and the other, in the dark of the back room. These two free-standing neon sculptures acted like beacons for the journey, marking the way forward and transmitting information from up ahead. Installed in the dark back room, along with the second freestanding neon, was one final light, in the form of a lightbox displaying an image of myself with the Malevich stone at Romashkovo-2. High up in the corner of this room, hung like a domestic icon, was a framed ‘Black Square’ print. A cheap reproduction that I had purchased at the Hermitage Museum after missing out on seeing the Black Square paintings in St Petersburg. Not being able to see Black Square in its original context, I had purchased the print as a reminder of the experience of the loss of the aura. A souvenir of a sight unseen.
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ItemThe Future of Fashion is Now(OCT Contemporary Art Terminal, 2015)
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ItemAs If: Echoes from London(AS IF festival, 2015)
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ItemMilk and Cookies(Conduit Arts, 2015)
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ItemBaby Shot Me Down(Project Space, 2015)
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ItemThe Pahoki Family: A Portrait(Attic Gallery, 2015)