Join us for the opening of Figa No Face by Lilah Benetti and Virtual Gaze by Annabelle McEwen
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6pm Thursday, 18 September at photo access
Gallery 1 & 2
Figa No Face by Lilah Benetti
The image is never neutral. Each photograph carries the weight of what has come before, rippling across borders into the political present, folding into impressions, memories, and projections.
Figa No Face emerges from Black and Blur, Benetti’s ongoing transdisciplinary project building a living, relational archive of Black queer memory, kinship and cultural survival across Australia, Africa and the UK. For this exhibition, Benetti draws on conversations in West Africa with elders, activists, artists and others living at the intersection of marginalised Black life, engaging Indigenous knowledge systems that view the body as spiritual and relational rather than singular.
Here the figure emerges not as fixed self but as trace, where memory drifts into myth, fragments gather into story, and absence becomes its own inheritance. To acknowledge obscurity is to recognise that imagination endures.
This exhibition is supported by British Council, City of Melbourne, Image Science, Spicers and Hahnemuhle.
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Gallery 3
Virtual Gaze by Annabelle McEwen
Virtual Gaze interrogates corporate surveillance of the body, where gestures and expressions are observed, hijacked and interpreted by algorithms. Synthesising analogue photography, digital technologies and material processes, the project considers how surveillance systems and algorithmically curated content shape agency, reality and future.
Restaging expressions from The Cohn-Kanade Dataset, a source for machine-learning affect recognition, the portraits use expanded photographic methods such as photogrammetry and gaussian splatting to capture a virtual gaze of the body. Sculptural prints in materials like copper echo the infrastructures of surveillance, exposing and visualising the power structures embedded in contemporary technologies.
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Opening remarks will be delivered by Serena Bentley (Senior Curator at the National Portrait Gallery) at 6:30pm.
The exhibitions will continue until Saturday 18 October.
Also check out other Exhibitions in Canberra.
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