Costume for a Mourner, 2010, 8’22’
City Gallery, Nueva Zelanda. www.citygallery.org.nz
The film re-invents a dance from the ballet Le Chant du rossignol – a Ballet Russes production composed by Igor Stravinsky under the directorship of Sergei Diaghilev. The ballet was based on the popular Hans Christian Andersen tale The Nightingale, a tale of a Chinese Emperor who replaces his beloved Nightingale with a mechanical automaton. At the end of the story, as the Emperor lies prone, deathly ill, the Mourners come to dance his farewell. He is visited by Death who takes his crown and sits on his heart, flanked by the faces of his past deeds both good and bad. The Emperor calls for music to banish the ghostly apparitions and the gaze of Death’s hollow eyes, for the “bang of the great Chinese drum,”5 but his court has already forsaken him. The Nightingale hears the Emperor’s cry from her exile in the forest, returns to revive him and charms Death with the beauty of her song.
The gaps and cracks and faultlines of ‘definitive’ histories is where Spong is most comfortable with, sifting through history’s rubble to find the disparate traces that might become the material for filmic (and occasionally sculptural) thoughts. Often reminiscent of another age – of times, places and things only dreamed of or sung about – Spong’s sources are never first hand and her works are based not on research or facts, but on a rarefied blend of rumour, myth and hearsay. Spong’s viewpoint is that of an outsider – a modus operandi that allows her to inhabit the ambiguous space between histories and cultures, to dance on the peripheries, and consequently to direct us back to her chosen subject’s ideological framework and the conditions of its social mediation.
Sriwhana Spong (1979, Auckland, New Zeland). Since graduating from Elam School of Fine Art in 2001, Sriwhana Spong’s work has been exhibited throughout Australasia and more recently in the USA and Europe. As well maintaining a schedule of solo shows, Sriwhana has participated in exhibitions such as: For Keeps, Auckland Art Gallery, Auckland; New World Records, Sutton Gallery, Melbourne (2009); Turbulence: 3rd Auckland Triennial, Artspace, Auckland (2007); A Tale of Two Cities, Busan Biennale, Busan (2006); Cultural Futures, St. Paul Street Gallery, Auckland (2005); and Break Shift, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth (2004). In 2005 Spong was the winner of the Trust Waikato National Contemporary Art Award, in 2007 she completed a residency at Artspace Sydney, and in 2008 she participated in the ISCP Studio Residency Program in New York City.