Projections #15: Collective labours Jane Jin Kaisen, Eugenia Lim and Leyla Stevens

The Art Gallery of New South Wales’ latest Projections program, Collective labours, brings focus to the experimental moving image work of Jane Jin Kaisen, Eugenia Lim and Leyla Stevens – three female Asian-diaspora artists whose work responds to the Indo-Pacific region.

This program draws out threads of contemporary moving image practice that are preoccupied with place, performance, notions of labour and ritual, and the way the Asia-Pacific region has been shaped by globalised flows of capital.

From a funeral procession in the ruins of an abandoned resort on Jeju Island, South Korea, to rehearsals for a performance on Bali, Indonesia, and to the precarious labour conditions of Asian delivery riders at Melbourne’s Victorian Trades Hall, each work draws out the tensions and histories in our interconnected region.

The screening of these works will be followed by a conversation between artists Eugenia Lim and Leyla Stevens, convened by the Art Gallery's curator of film, Ruby Arrowsmith-Todd.

Works to be screened:

• Leyla Stevens GROH GOH (Rehearsal for Rangda) 2023, 23 min

• Jane Jin Kaisen Burial of this order 2022, 25 min

• Eugenia Lim (with APHIDS) Destiny 2021, 15:31 min 

The event is held in association with the exhibition A moment in extended crisis curated by Andy Butler at UTS Gallery at the University of Technology Sydney in Ultimo, from 23 April to 28 June 2024.

About the artists

Jane Jin Kaisen was born 1980 in Jeju Island, South Korea, and lives in Copenhagen, Denmark. She is a visual artist, filmmaker and professor of the School of Media Arts, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Spanning the mediums of video installation, narrative experimental film, photographic installation, performance, and text, Kaisen’s artistic practice is informed by extensive interdisciplinary research, long-term collaborations, and engagement with minority communities. She is known for her visually striking, multilayered, performative, poetic, and multi-voiced feminist works through which past and present are brought into relation. Engaging topics such as memory, migration, borders, and translation, she activates the field where lived experience and embodied knowledge intersect with larger political histories.

Eugenia Lim is an artist of Chinese–Singaporean ancestry who works across body, lens, social and spatial practice to explore how migration and capital cut, divide and bond our interdependent, planetary commons. An ongoing strand of practice considers work, collectivity, technology and ethics, and art and capital as strange bedfellows. Often a performer within her own works, Lim invents personas to explore the tensions of the individual within society – alienation and belonging in a globalised world.

Leyla Stevens is an Australian–Balinese artist who works within a lens-based practice. Her work has made a significant contribution to expanded documentary genres in Australian video art, as well as exploring the reparative potential of art-making framed within political and social justice issues. Her practice is informed by ongoing engagements with storied places, archives, cultural geographies and performance lineages through a transcultural lens. As research- led artist, she is guided by collaborative engagements with place and communities, and her interest lies in the recuperation of counter histories within dominant narratives.