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As part of Artbank's March program and to celebrate International Women’s Day – Artbank is once again joining forces with Wikimedia Australia to host an interactive Wikipedia Edit-a-thon focusing on increasing information about Australian women artists on Wikipedia. Join Wikimedia Australia’ s Alice Woods and Alison Smith along with the Artbank Team for an interactive workshop where you will have the opportunity to work on Wikipedia entries of artists featured in the Artbank Collection.
The workshop will include research resources and access to the Artbank Collection and Library. Basic computer skills are required. No previous Wikipedia editing experience is necessary. Bring your own laptop. The workshop will be followed by a tour of the Artbank collection racks and a viewing of A gestural drift, curated by Sara Oscar in the Artbank Window.
Presented in partnership with Wikimedia Australia for International Women’s Day 2025.
When: Friday 7 March, 2025
Wikimedia Edit-a-thon workshop: 2pm – 4pm
RSVP HERE
Where: Artbank Sydney, Unit 1, 222 Young St Waterloo
For more information please contact media@artbank.gov.au
Featured artist: Paul Adair, James Barth, Barbara Cleveland, Pilar Mata Dupont & Tarryn Gill, Cherine Fahd, Simryn Gill, Shaun Gladwell, Amrita Hepi, Robin Hearfield, Harley Ives, Sara Oscar, Clare Rae, Sam Smith, Grant Stevens, Shan Turner-Carroll, Emmaline Zanelli
A gestural drift - curated by Sara Oscar
In 2024, Artbank acquired a triptych from my series Counterfactual Departures (2023). In this work, I used a generative artificial intelligence (AI) image creation platform to reconstruct the undocumented migration of my mother from Thailand to Australia in the 1970s and to fill in the gaps of my familial archive. I turned details of her migration story into text-based prompts, allowing the technology to speculate on history through learned patterns trained on image datasets scraped, labeled, and grouped from the internet. In this way, I was aiming to reconstruct an event – flawed with bias, based on the known world of gestures, from bodily poses and facial expressions to artistic styles.
The works in A gestural drift expand on my interest in rendering human poses and gestures using technologies of representation such as computer graphics, text, photography, moving image and painting. Drawn from the Artbank collection through catalogue search terms such as, body, pose, figure, these works explore how gesture is repeated, translated, and transformed across time and technology. There are certain affinities between motifs and poses appearing throughout these works: the appropriated poses of classical sculpture, the bodily arch drawn by the nineteenth century hysterical woman, the performance of an exercise or a dance routine, a smile, or wave of the hand. As gestures, they transmit identity and being as a communicative language, modelling and moulding the statistical outputs that are mass informational forms.
Sara Oscar is an Australian artist of Eurasian decent working with photography and the moving image. Her work explores the role of photographic technology in capturing and classifying human identity and storing these memories. Sara Oscar is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Design at the University of Technology, Sydney.
