“Colonising West Space”
Salote Tawale
14 Nov → 13 Dec 2014

Salote Tawale will colonise West Space through the placement of sculptural objects, colour branding and photographic imagery. The objects are constructed from found materials, modified to reflect the artist’s own cultural references and the site West Space, an organisation that facilitates creative/cultural projects.

The works will be placed in all spaces throughout 1/225 Bourke Street, through performed rituals documented and presented in the Back Space as a celebration and archive of Colonial settlement. When underlying structures of an already established space are shifted through physical interactions and the introduction of objects, new emotional and historical narratives are made possible. It is through this that cultural exchanges occur, new social engagements arise and established modes of interaction are transformed.

Through performance, Salote Tawale explores the identity of the individual in collective systems. Projects draw upon personal experiences of race, ethnicity and gender, growing up in suburban Australia. Employing photography, video, installation and live performance in her work’s, Tawale is heavily influenced by the feminist video artists from the 1970’s. Interested in the viewer’s experience within a work she often employs tactics of resistance or pathways to negotiate where the audience is taken on a physical and/or intellectual journey towards multiple possibilities.

Having exhibited widely within Australia and internationally: including the Wellington Art Centre (NZ), Indonesian Contemporary Art Network Yogyakarta (IE), and Oxford Modern (UK), Tawale undertook a self-devised tour of American video archives (Chicago and NYC), funded by the Australia Council, and has been included in national and international publications including, Mapping South: Journeys in South-South Cultural Relations edited by Anthony Gardner; Art in Australia; Realtime and Artlink.

Community development is also a large part of her practice, most recently producing a youth workshop program and exhibition, Pattern and Portraiture, for the Contemporary Pacific Arts Festival 2014; and co-curating Out of sequence, a video exhibition, with Jacob Tolo for the same festival. Tawale has lectured and tutored at Monash and Deakin Universities and currently completing a Masters of Fine Art at the University of Sydney on an APA scholarship having previously completed a Bachelor of Arts (Media Arts) and a Master of Fine Arts (coursework) at RMIT University.