sixty five kilograms 2023

11 Nov 2023 : Photo shoot taken at Wentworth Falls School of Arts, Blue Mountains, NSW, Australia

sixty five kilograms, the measure of a man, the weight of a soul is a photographic tryptich I made as a performance for camera, commissioning photographer David Brazil to collaborate with me. The work was created as an entry for the 68th Blake Prize for Religious Art 2024 (Sydney) but was not a selected finalist.

These portraits, extracted from my trajectory in performance, display accumulated matter to ponder a life’s value as an immeasurable, imponderable collision of interconnections, blessings, tragedies and consequences. What is a Man? Posed with my body weight in substances, I question the value of human life in this triptych, each panel offering multiple associations. Employing ubiquitous yet symbolic materials, I reflect through representations of cleansing, of human fat, of being reduced, on a life frozen in time as a pillar of salt, and on the need for a sweetener. Soap for washing away, renewal, but also ethnic cleansing, human fat, fallen walls, Aleppo and The Holocaust. Sugar for festivity, deception, separation, bittersweet memory, parting and loss. Salt for purification, preservation, yearning and disappearance, and as a contract. Lot’s departure from Sodom, a pinch of salt, salt of the earth. Using “man” (after Levi) in the universal sense to ask what is the value of a life? What are the physical, spiritual and existential values of human kind? I was born just seven years after the horror of WW2, but the refrain “never again”, intended to plead immutable values of humanity, fairness and equality, remains disregarded in the tumult of today’s conflicts.

Photographic triptych

L-R : sixty five kilograms soap, sixty five kilograms sugar, sixty five kilograms salt

Dimensions: 200cm h x 145cm w each