Through an extravagant pose plastered on a billboard, Thai-Australian artist Kawita Vatanajyankur asks viewers to consider the human labour expended within their consumption habits. Vatanajyankur’s Carrier II, installed on the exterior of the University of Melbourne’s School of Mathematics and Statistics building, shows her body suspended by ropes against a blue background bearing towering fish baskets. The work illuminates the fraught relationship between humans and their labour by symbolising the tribulations of the Thai fishing industry to a culturally-distanced audience, the University of Melbourne’s crowds.
Exhibition response: Kawita Vatanajyankur’s Aesthetics of Perpetual Toil by Tahney Fosdike originally published in Farrago as part of Next Wave Festival’s emerging writers program (December 2018).
Read more of Tahney’s arts criticism here.