Kudos acknowledges and pays respect to the Gadigal and Bidjigal people of the Eora nation. They are the traditional custodians of the land Kudos operates on. We create, design, share, and exchange our work and knowledge on this important meeting place. We pay our respects to elders past and present and extend that respect to any First Nations people who engage with Kudos. This is and always will be Aboriginal land.
Justin Cueno
The works within de-erasure emerge from Cueno’s ongoing interrogation of what it means to live at the intersection of disconnection and desire—for ancestry, for belonging, and for the right to define one’s cultural identity on one’s own terms. The exhibition positions the body—often Cueno’s own—as a living archive, inscribed with both visible and invisible inheritances. Across multiple channels and formats, Cueno transforms intimate gestures into acts of resistance, using stillness, repetition, and collaboration to render the invisible visible.
Materials traditionally coded as domestic or ephemeral—banana leaves, walis tambo (brooms), wooden carvings—are recontextualized as carriers of ancestral memory. These elements become tools of ritual and reclamation, re-inscribed through performance and mark-making. Cueno’s aesthetic choices speak to the inherited textures of his cultural lineage, where everyday objects become vessels of both loss and endurance.
A central body of work in de-erasure is Skin, a series of large-scale photographic self-portraits that use the banana leaf as both surface and skin—an organic metaphor for the artist’s relationship to cultural identity. The fragility, bruising, and inevitable decay of the leaf echoes the experience of inherited cultural dislocation, while its vibrant green evokes life, resilience, and re-rooting. In Skin, Cueno examines the tension between visibility and self-erasure: how the body is read, misread, or overwritten through the lens of colonialism. Each portrait is a performance of reclamation, where the skin becomes both subject and site—an unstable ground upon which identity is not merely worn, but written, rewritten, and resisted.
Among the moving image works, Paint Me White stages a haunting confrontation with whiteness and cultural assimilation, as the artist’s body is gradually erased under layers of white paint. In Live with Mum, Cueno engages in intergenerational collaboration, inviting his mother into a shared performance that navigates language, care, and the emotional inheritance of migration. Meanwhile, Mokong Shuffle references the performative codes of subservience and assimilation, undoing them through repetition and subversion.
Throughout de-erasure, Cueno embraces the aesthetics of process over polish—rejecting the demand for cultural legibility or assimilation. Drawing inspiration from Virgil Abloh’s ethos of visibility and transparency, Cueno leaves the seams exposed: the raw edges of banana leaves, the visible stitching of narratives coming undone and restitched. This approach honors the messy, unfinished nature of diasporic identity—what it means to live between cultures, languages, and histories.
Rather than provide closure, de-erasure holds space. It invites viewers into a durational unfolding—of grief, of joy, of resistance, and of becoming. Here, memory is not static but lived and relieved. In Cueno’s world, erasure is not an ending but an invitation: to reimagine, to reconnect, and ultimately, to reclaim.
Documentation by Justin Cueno