PORTRAIT23: Identity

BMA Mag’s TAMSIN KEMP took a tour of the National Portrait Gallery’s latest enthralling exhibition PORTRAIT23: Identity, a collection or works that interrogate what sits at the heart of genre - identity.

By Tamsin Kemp

“It takes two to speak the truthone to speak, and another to hear.”

- Henry David Thoreau

What do you hear when you put a shell to your ear? The sea, all the stories of the sea, from all time and all places. The everywhen.

Standing beside you, as you enter Portrait23, is Christopher Bassi’s self-portrait A piece of the continent, a part of the main, where he stands in a haze of golden light, listening to shell that we know contains the whole world. Bassi is our instructor. His life size body, gently leaning into secrets, tells us we are not here just to view, but to listen.

Opening the exhibition with palpable excitement for the works, Sandra Bruce, National Portrait Gallery Director of Collection and Exhibitions, highlights how the commissioned artists were invited to “play in spaces we haven’t played in before”.

Bruce welcomes us into the “breadth of conversation” in an exhibition that “interrogate(s) what sits at the heart of the genre – identity”.

Identities in shapes and layers we may not have previously labelled as portraiture but will leave us expanded in our understanding of how we describe ourselves as humans.

To help us to recognise the shapeshifters that we are.

For rooms full of multi-media, contemporary practice, and intersecting concepts, there is a strange and overwhelming sense of the ancient to be felt.

There is a richness in the works, media carefully chosen and crafted to be as much the custodian of the story as the image or form itself.

Such as with Abdul Abdullah’s magnificent duo of tapestries. The young men who wear the heads of mythological ‘Weretiger’ are on a cultural tightrope, balancing between life worlds, between plural histories and futures.

This is all contained in the luxurious threads, colours, and craft of the weaving as much as the pictorial references of pattern, what the boys wear, and their street-smart postures.

Histories also ooze from Sally Smart’s delightful, if somewhat macabre, troupe of puppet figures. They stand like a company of dancers waiting for the music.

Totally appropriate given the relationship to the Ballet Russes present here. The costumes— they feel like costume rather than everyday dress—are putting their hands up for roll call – Goncharova? Here. Matisse? Here. Delaunay? Here. Picasso? Haven’t seen him today Miss, he’s probably at the beach… I am lucky enough to speak with Smart, and she talks about “what is worth reimagining”. Lineages, it would appear: honouring them, building on them, giving them more time and space to share their stories. Shapes and palettes that echo the magnificence of the Ballet Russes originals but also pull us into the pleasure of performance itself.

The figure I love best is the with the smock printed with the image of a dancer wearing Smart’s costume from a previous performance, the movement and swing of the live body hung on this gangly, and empty, member of The Artist’s Family

A body on a non-body, but what is a body anyway? The knowing bronze head asks us. Deborah Kelly is posing a similar question, with her work A Stitch in Time. Two larger than life portraits of artists she has been working with on a series since 2013, replete with symbolic flora and fauna, depict the ways our bodies and skin reflect our lived experience.

Taumoepeau, on the right, has the ocean in her belly, starfish on her skin. And we are all invited to the skin.

By the time Kelly has facilitated the collaborative sewing circles with the willing public, they will be bedecked with beading, ribbons, embroidery, and of course love, continuing the “unfolding evolution” of these “participatory portraits”.

Invitation is also at the heart of Vipoo Srivilasa’s little army of ceramic portrait figurines. The works were developed in response to submissions from the public.

People were asked to draw themselves in an outfit representing the happiest version of themselves, with this happiest version dressed in their best ‘Australian Eleganza Extravaganza outfit’.

Srivilasa has given these stories flesh. Like eccentric wedding cake figures, or gods and goddesses playing dress ups, the ten on the catwalk are as poetic as they are whimsical.

Happy Australian offers an appearance of nonsense that belies the depth of feeling in the stories submitted. These vivid imaginings were born of the isolating days of the pandemic after all, and one of the most touching aspects of Srivilasa’s waggish work is this exquisite little community he has built. They are no longer alone, they are here in some kind of person, and they all are telling you stories.

The River Rock Cod and the Kangaroo have a story too. Naomi Hobson’s collection of clay objects take us through how the love between fish and kangaroo formed Country.

The objects speak of place—rocks, trees, coffins, fires—and how place is inextricable from person and identity.

The Yarrenyty Arltere artists, while the mode and media differ, have given us objects that speak of place, too.

Described as “soft sculpture memory portraits”, the birds and animals appear to have sprung from the earth itself.

Emblems of moments in time, made by hands that have received and imparted knowledge of skills and stories for countless generations, these colourful messengers are a powerful description of spiritual connection to Country. There are so many works here that will capture you in a gaze, maybe give the sense you are the observed as much as you are the observer (Dylan Mooney’s A Way with Words, Tarryn Gill’s Limber).

The pervasive sense of the ancient remains; land, memory, spirit, kin, are all in union here. Louder in some works more than others, but this is very much the new and the old at a powerful interface.

A place of skins – skins that bind us as we live, release us when we die, skins that are permeable, cultural, familial, that allow us to inhabit liminal spaces across identities.

Shapeshifting ancestors hang around the gallery waiting for you to notice them.

Portrait23: Identity is on daily from 10 March until Sunday, 18 June 2023.

For more information on the collaborative sewing circles for Kelly’s work at: portrait.gov.au/calendar/a-stitch-intime/2693