Kudos acknowledges and pays respect to the Gadigal and Bidjigal people of the Eora nation. They are the traditional custodians of the land Kudos Online 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 visit Kudos Online. This is and always will be Aboriginal land.

Yazmeen Meedin

Torsion

Keroshin Govender, Tia Madden, Sarah Yaacoub, Kadie Dao

torsion is both a group exhibition and an intimate, sensory articulation of the body, tracking the way we manifest our personhood. Through language, heritage, dress and food, Kadie Dao, Sarah Yaacoub, Keroshin Govender and Tia Madden engage with the physical body as a complex structure of personal histories, lived experiences, identities and beliefs. Ironically (or perhaps unironically), torsion bears little to no resemblance to the original proposal, which has since contorted, transformed and twisted until somewhere in its process of realisation, it became something completely different. torsion speaks to the moulding, twisting, bending, breaking, and tearing we both do, and are capable of doing.

Works by Kadie Dao (textiles, film) and Tia Madden (installation, drawing) use their respective mediums to address absence and presence. Dao uses her clothing label, Twinqualia, to draw on femininity and the divine to blend surrealist motifs and corporeality. Her pieces were installed to appear as though they were floating in midair, to suggest the physical body, and imply its presence in its absence. Madden however, utilises her research on Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic texts to inform her work and wider artistic practice. Through the creation of a speculative alphabet, she examines mark-making, the contortion of language and script and the mis/reading of symbols, blurring the relationship between a culture and its products, and reflecting its significance to civilisation and selfhood.

Additionally, works by Keroshin Govender (sculpture, performance) and Sarah Yaacoub (installation) interrogate notions of lived experience, tradition, displacement, conflict and (dis)comfort. Govender utilises clay and performance to reflect upon personal history, extracting key verbs from South Africa’s apartheid Act and superimposing these actions onto clay. Through performative repetition, each clay item gets progressively more distorted through his actions.

Similarly, Yaacoub uses bread to investigate notions of domesticity, family and yearning. Her installation’s exterior consists entirely of baked bread and raw dough, the seen and unseen labour of kneading, stretching, gouging and baking forming an ode to her heritage through German heritage. torsion explores and questions the way we contort, or are contorted in order to both accommodate for ourselves and for the world around us. In this context, contortion becomes a framework with which to read the invisible lines between the conceptual and the tactile. In equal parts, the body is able to both create vessels and exist as one - interrogating and questioning, but also inhabiting the spaces that we make for ourselves.