PICA and Perth Festival invite you to the opening of We hold you close, Katie West and Monumental, Amrita Hepi.

Join us for a Welcome to Country by Whadjuk Balardong Noongar woman Ingrid Cumming, an opening address by Perth Festival Artistic Director Iain Grandage and a special musical performance.

ABOUT THE EXHIBITIONS

We hold you close by Katie West

Drawing together textiles, sound, and video, York-based Yindjibarndi artist Katie West presents We hold you close. West’s immersive exhibition invites us to reconsider our relationship with the natural environment and each other. Get comfortable as you sit amidst suspended textile works and join others in making twisted string from re-purposed fabric. Immerse yourself in a soundscape recorded by Josten Myburgh and scored by West’s long-time collaborator, composer Simon Charles. The soundscape incorporates string instrumentation by musicians Djuna Lee and Jameson Feakes, and is a response to the movement and patterns of making string by hand. We Hold You Close is curated by WA born, Rotterdam based curator Eloise Sweetman.

Monumental by Amrita Hepi

Presented in Perth for the first time and created by Bunjalung/Ngapuhi artist and choreographer Amrita Hepi, Monumental presents a video installation that casts a central colonial figure within a continual sunrise… or is it a sunset? This central figure is serenaded by a group of dancers, Hepi among them, and then eventually toppled and replaced. In the wake of Black Lives Matter protests and renewed calls for the removal of inherited monuments that symbolise colonialism and its ongoing legacies, Monumental offers a charged meditation on the tradition of building monuments, questioning who and what gets memorialised.

Exhibitions run from 20 February 2022 to 24 April 2022 and are presented in association with Perth Festival.