BODIES BEYOND THE SKIN
Isabella Capezio
11 - 27 April 2025, Platform
Exhibition opening 6pm Thursday 10 April 2025
Bodies Beyond the Skin interrogates settler visions of ‘nature’ and employ the concept of ‘queering’ as a methodology for unsettling the formulations of the Australian landscape through a range of photographic practices, including cameraless photography, video, and installation.
Photography has historically assisted the colonial project through the capture, categorisation, and narrativisation of ecologies as ‘space.’ If photography and visual representations of the land are complicit in reinforcing and reproducing the colonial systems, then how can practitioners work their way out of this entanglement?
This exhibition investigates how landscape photography has privileged hierarchical masculinist assumptions and seeks to problematise this schema by using ‘queer’ and camp methodologies to ‘betray,’ ‘pervert,’ ‘fail,’ and ultimately ‘unsettle’ existing narratives of Australian landscape via an expanded photography practice.
The work is comprised of a suite of small anthotype prints based from Australian War Memorial photographs of people engaging in camouflage operations. Anthotypes use a plant emulsion and the image remains unfixed shifting and fading over the course of the exhibition, for this reason the prints would be made in the month preceding the exhibition. Decoy is a series of three large scale cameraless, C-type prints that trace Wattle, Casuarina and Eucalyptus in a colourful filtration. Scene//Unseen is a dual-screen moving image work with sound scape that forms a dialogic central piece filmed on two opposing sides of Nadya Ngambri / Mt Ainslie, while one of the bodies wears a military garment that attempts to co-opt nature, the other body exposes itself as a camera and a body covered in light sensitive photographic matter.
This exhibition imagines a body beyond the skin: one that is part of a larger ecology, queering materials and photographic practices that challenge archival temporalities and betray notions of a fixed landscape.
Image: Isabella Capezio Scene Unseen (installation) 2024, photo courtesy the artist
