In Indonesian New Zealander artist Sriwhana practice, language, sound, and bodies function as both subject matter and medium. While Spong's earlier work examined histories of the so-called East through the lens of Euro-American exoticisation, her later sculptures, films, and performances have focused on the body and its relationship to history, place, and time, drawing the artist into the orbit of women she refers to as 'mystic writers'.
The ephemeral nature of dance and performance has been Spong's longest-standing interest. Comprising her 2012 Walters Prize finalist work Fanta Silver and Song, the films Costume for a Mourner and Lethe-wards reimagine a lost choreography originally performed by the Ballets Russes—a Paris-based dance company active in the early 20th century. For the sculpture The Stranger's House (2012), Spong returned to the Ballets Russes as subject matter, this time remaking a failed theatrical backdrop designed by Australian modernist painter Sidney Nolan for the original production of Icare—an act described by the artist as 'breaking-and-entering' into the legacy of a canonical white male artist. For her film Fourth Notebook (2015), Spong created a choreographic score from the rhythm of words in a letter written by the celebrated Polish-Russian dancer Vaslav Nijinsky as his mental condition deteriorated from schizophrenia.
In 2015, Spong began a series of furniture-based works bearing the initials of peers and women of influence in her life, including mystics, artists, and collaborators. Inspired by American artist-poet Florine Stettheimer's Portrait of Marcel Duchamp and Rrose Sélavy (1923), which bears the initials 'MD' around the frame's edge, Spong created VS!MF!TB! (2015)—a set of tables intended as a gift for their namesake to later to work on.
From 2016, Spong has created percussive instruments as part of an expanding 'personal orchestra'. Drawing from the Balinese Gamelan and the tradition in which each village has its own tuning system for producing uniquely pitched instruments, the artist creates records of place and the people with whom she collaborates (Like the above-mentioned furniture series, each instrument is named for someone). Instrument D (Vera)—a set of chimes made from aluminium cast French fries—pairs with Costume for Instrument D (Vera)—a silk dress dyed in Coca Cola and patterned with vegetable oil. Both draw on the use of common food items in Balinese culture as daily offerings, transforming everyday foods into mediums of contact with the sacred. So does Villa America (2012)—a brightly-coloured silk banner dyed in Fanta and one in a series of banners inspired by American musician and writer Ian F Svenonius' 2006 essay 'The bloody latte: Vampirism as mass movement'. The essay is a historical account of beverages and their circulation as acts of colonial bloodsucking, but Spong's dyed silk banners and dresses are more than unalloyed reproaches of colonisation and global capitalism as homogenising forces; the works consider the power of collective experience by acknowledging these consumed substances' effect as at once toxic and joyous.
Over recent years, Spong's practice has been informed by a constellation of women mystic writers and creators. These include Margery Kempe (c 1373-c 1440)—the Christian mystic believed to have written the first autobiography in the English language, who is the subject of Spong's film This Creature (2016). Similarly, the Lingua Ignota (unknown language) of Hildegard von Bingen—the 12th century German polymath—becomes the locus of Spong's meditation on the female body's relationship to language, writing, and notions of the sacred in her film a hook but no fish (2017). The structure of her recent films—moving across time and place—is inspired by these medieval mystics. Her writing, as it appears in her most recent films, slips between fiction and non-fiction, reflecting Spong's upbringing in New Zealand removed from Indonesian culture, where parts of her Balinese heritage 'had to be fictionalised and imagined in order to exist, to take up space, to speak'.
Her work has been included in solo and group presentations at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth (2018); Pump House Gallery, London (2018); KADIST, San Francisco (2018); Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore (2016); daadgalerie, Berlin (2016); Carriageworks, Sydney (2015); The Jewish Museum, New York (2015); Art Basel Hong Kong (2014); Art Gallery of New South Wales (2013); Guangdong Times Museum (2013); and the 18th Biennale of Sydney (2012).
Spong currently lives and works in London.
Melbourne Art Week returns to much fanfare this year, taking place between 30 July and 5 August 2018 with the biennial Melbourne Art Fair holding centre stage after its hiatus in 2016 (2–5 August 2018). Situated across two venues within the Southbank Arts Precinct and presenting 40 new and established galleries from Australia, New Zealand and...
Sriwhana Spong's first solo museum exhibition in New Zealand at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, a hook but no fish (12 May–22 July 2018), explored a unique language—the Lingua Ignota (Latin for 'unknown language')—used by a medieval female German mystic, abbess, composer, and writer Hildegard von Bingen. After its first showing in...
What could a medieval female mystic have to offer a contemporary artist?Sriwhana Spong has seen a snake, befriended a rat, cast a spell for a critically endangered bird. She has engaged with all manner of living creatures in her work and yet her latest exhibition is titled for a lack of animal: a hook but no fish.For me, this is a foreboding...
A warning, perhaps, for reviewers. On the second floor of the Govett Brewster large sheets of paper are lit by vivid red lights. In the gloom, we can make out semi-deconstructed poems and brief statements: coherent, unclear, clear – she / shallowness-depth-she / Less-less-than lack-she. The artwork is Bad Review (2018), and in it Sriwhana Spong has...
Living in 12th-century Germany, Hildegard von Bingen was a well-known mystic and prolific polymath. At Disibodenberg monastery, where she spent most of her life, she wrote on science and medicine, composed one of the largest surviving repertoires of medieval music, penned what is perhaps the first morality play, and created what was arguably the...
For her first solo exhibition in the UK, London-based New Zealand artist Sriwhana Spong excavates the Lingua Ignota, a secret language composed by 12th-century mystic Hildegard von Bingen. Across the Pump House Gallery's four storeys, works ranging from costume to votive offerings, large-scale watercolours and a percussive instrument orbit the...
New Zealand/Balinese artist Sriwhana Spong's new exhibition in New Plymouthexplores a unique language used by a medieval female German mystic and abbess, Hildegard von Bingen. She's added some new elements to the show a hook but no fish, during her time as the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery's 2018 artist in residence since it was first shown in London...
A new exhibition inspired by a secret 12th-century language created by a German mystic has opened in Battersea. Through her paintings, the artist Sriwhana Spong explores the relationship between language and sounds. Sriwhana Spong : a hook but no fish is on at the Pump House Gallery until April.
The Australian War Memorial invited five New Zealand and five Australian artists to each create an artistic response to World War I (1914–19). These videos record the responses, thoughts, working processes, and printmaking techniques of the ten artists as they develop their prints in dialogue with Australian master printmaker John Loane.
Sriwhana Spong explores the way art can draw upon fragments from history to re-imagine a past event or performance. In her digital video work Costume for a Mourner (2010) she re-interprets a dance from an historic Ballets Russes performance. This work featured in the exhibition Collecting Contemporary, June 2011 - January 2012.