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Installation view, 'A gestural drift' exhibition curated by Sara Oscar, Artbank Window, Sydney, 2025.
To celebrate the acquisition of Sara Oscar’s artwork A hyper realistic photograph of a pregnant Thai woman, tall woman in suit, falling luggage, chaos, airport parking lot, theatrical gestures, falling – – scale 1:1, quality 1 Artbank has invited Sara Oscar to curate our Sydney Window.
On view now through the Artbank Sydney Window and online
Opening event
When: Thursday 20 March 2025, 5 – 7 pm
Where: Artbank Sydney, 222 Young Street Waterloo
RSVP: via EVENTBRITE LINK or rsvps@artbank.gov.au
Featured Artists:
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 and Emmaline Zanelli.
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.
