Making Space

Winner of the 2022 Exploration Emerging Artist Award, Kirthana Selvaraj is a Queer, South Asian artist, working on the unceded Gadigal Land of the Eora Nation (Sydney, Australia). Drawing on both individual and collective experiences within a neo-colonial feminist discourse, her practice is centred on race, intersections of seen and unseen, violence and passivity, gender and sexuality.

ARTIST STATEMENT: Initially this shows’ concept was to develop and contribute to an alternative archival history of Black and Brown creators, a collection of people who inspired me and who all in some way orbited my life, through the books I read, the media I consumed, the fashion I wore. In one way, I wanted to celebrate my peers that are achieving important things, representing an act of cultivating space for marginalised identities in their respective fields. As I spent time learning about each person, I found a common thread that weaved its way into each of their lives, and while many of them were unknown or unlinked to each other, they were at a crossroads, whether it was personal or creative, transitory, geographic changes, they were each shifting or starting again, discarding, or changing directions. This invited an opportunity for me to respond to the emerging themes that connected them all and transform my direction. Seeing the subjects within liminal spaces; transitory and sometimes ambiguous in its geography, I painted people who don’t traditionally get painted within the history of western portraiture or beyond art history, in these more complex ways. Often Black and Brown bodies have been depicted as a way of anthropological taxonomy. The lens almost always through a colonial gaze. I wanted to paint as to reveal the humanity of the body that I see, not abstracting it from the context of the places in which it navigates, but to situate it within the fields in which it operates and moves in, and the spaces in which it is carving out even more space for others to also step into.Making Space is not necessarily referring to the personal narrative of each person, it leans into this idea of a pluralistic meaning of being, that is beyond a single person. Capturing a moment in time, they are all vignettes of nuanced lives, of people at the precipice of change or unlearning. It is here I see an opportunity to add another dimension of the work, bringing in Black, Brown and people from the diaspora into the discourse, to ask themselves what making space means to them. Imbuing their own bodily histories into the works and potentially seeing themselves refracted in some way in the world.ARTIST BIO: Born in Auckland, New Zealand, Kirthana Selvaraj is a Queer, South Asian Artist, working on the unceded Gadigal Land of the Eora Nation (Sydney, Australia). Drawing on both individual and collective experiences within a Neo-colonial feminist discourse, her practice is centered on Race, intersections of the seen and unseen, violence and passivity, and Gender and Sexuality.

By engaging in methods of approaching Queer displacements purposefully yet conscientiously, she attempts to navigate experiences of QTPOC (Queer, Trans, and Non-binary people of colour) within the wider context of structural brutality and erasure.

The more formal elements of her work oscillate between contemporary realism and abstracted visualisations. She often works with oil paints as her primary medium focusing on the subject, disrupting iterations of heteronormativity whilst highlighting the archetypes of power that are situated within the Bio-political and Necropolitical regulation of Queer/displaced bodies.

Since graduating from the University of New South Wales with a Bachelor of Fine Art, and a Master in Art Therapy from Western Sydney University, Selvaraj has been a finalist in the prestigious Archibald Prize (2023, 2021) and thePortia Geach Memorial Award (2022, 2021, 2020).