Yavuz Gallery is pleased to debut at Enter Art Fair with a group presentation titled Frontiers, featuring leading artists from Asia-Pacific and Europe: Christopher Bassi (b. 1990, Australia), Patricia Piccinini (b. 1965, Australia/Sierra Leone), Stanislava Pinchuk (b. 1988, Ukraine) and Jason Wee (b. 1979, Singapore). Encompassing works on paper, metal, painting, video and sculpture, Frontiers brings together critical artists traversing across inland and oceanic motifs to speak of their connection to home and place, to negotiate the political and poetic in their nuanced examination of personal histories, shared relationships, and humankind.
Christopher Bassi is a descendant of the Meriam and Yupungathi peoples of the Torres Strait and Cape York Peninsula, Australia. Working with archetypal models of representational painting, his work engages with the medium as sociological and historical text. Through critical re-imagining, his paintings become a space for a type of speculative storytelling that consider questions of history, place and the entangling of personal & collective experience. Bassi will present a new large-scale painting titled “The Shade From the Sun” that depicts a lush palm tree set against a warm incandescent backdrop. The work that acts as a means for the artist to locate himself in the world, connecting his home of Brisbane with his family connections to Far North Queensland and the Torres Strait where these plant species flourish, subverting commonly held tropes on Australian landscape.
Patricia Piccinini is one of Australia’s most-important artists known for her hyper-realistic and peculiar sculptures that depict hybrid humanoid creatures. Rendered in materials such as fibreglass, silicone and hair, her works explore the dynamics of our relationship between families and species, science and nature, art, and the environment. Unusual yet endearing, her sculptures challenge audiences to question what it means to be human today. At Enter Art Fair, Piccinini will present “While She Sleeps”, a sculpture that depicts a pair of chimeras cradling each other. Based on the Tasmanian tiger, the work represents the fantasy of undoing the extinction we cause, and raise questions on our relationship with the natural world. It will be presented alongside the video “The Awakening”, that depicts a surreal creature in the process of birth – a quintessentially common and inordinately miraculous event. Mesmerising, beautiful and disconcerting, she is known for creating provocative and pertinent artworks of our time. Her confronting figures challenge and question what it means to be human in an age of rapid advancement and to consider its social and ethical implications.
Stanislava Pinchuk explores the changing topographies of war and conflict zones. With a multidisciplinary practice that spans drawing, installation, tattooing, film and sculpture, Pinchuk surveys the ways in which landscape holds memory and testament of political events and violations of human rights. At the fair she will present a suite of five new delicate pinhole drawings titled “Root Systems (ITAofUA,Day 127, Roseltorg)” that draw upon her personal experiences and explore the enduring cost of war and conflict, both material and immaterial. In these works that Pinchuk has translated, pinhole by pinhole with an etching burin and hand-held mallet, code from the newly formed Ukrainian IT Army’s DDoS attacks. They map out digital frontiers to landscape targets in the current invasion of the artist’s home country – new to the world in the last 6 months. In war and genocide, all too much repeats tragic histories of colonial occupation, starvation and enforced language erasure in Ukraine – such root systems of code propose yet another version of a distinctly Ukrainian language; one which parallels the strength and resistance of the root systems of the artist’s language and their sustenance.
Jason Wee’s practice contends with sources of singular authority in favour of polyphony and difference. He transforms histories and spaces into various visual and written materials, and is keenly interested in their secrets and their futures, their idealisms and their conundrums. His recent projects uses a choral libretto as an invitation to consider a general assembly, takes cruising as a mode for queering landscapes and logistics, and argues for organizing as artistic form. At Enter Art Fair Wee will present an installation consisting of sculptures and digital drawings on panoramas and metal that explore various hidden geographies in Singapore, mapping sites that speak about place-making, and the ways they refute societal metaphorical and literal sightlines and limits. “Cruising to Nowhere” is a panoramic digital drawing on canvas that depicts an endless maritime horizon in a metaphoric search for an utopia. For Wee, the horizon has always been a line of anticipation, but now speaks of current anxieties around the lack of movement, lockdowns, and our shared future. In his metal works, “Native and Reclaimed and Dancing”, they encapsulate Wee’s utopian vision and call for a more diverse society, through the metaphor of native flora.