Pilar MATA DUPONT, The Embrace, 2013. Single channel HD video with sound, 5:04 minutes, edition 3 of 3. Purchased for Boola Katitjin 2022. Image courtesy of the artist and Moore Contemporary.
Boola Katitjin- Level 3, Breezeway South (on rotation)
Pilar MATA DUPONT
Born 1981 Perth, Western Australia
Lives and works Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Pilar Mata Dupont is an artist based between Western Australia and the Netherlands. Using highly theatrical and cinematic methods, she investigates histories, identity and mythologies through allegory and narrative. Through imaginings of the future and the reworking of histories and classical texts, she aims to create alternative readings that question the conditions of the construction of dominant narratives that shape history and its legacy in the present.
In The Embrace, Mata Dupont has animated reunification monuments from North and South Korea to play with utopian ideas of reconciliation, and the significance of the embrace as representation of the reunification in the South Korean national narrative. The two figures from the Three Charters for National Reunification monument embrace in joy, only to have their bliss dissipate and a new and unexpectedly uncomfortable era to emerge. The work references DPRK propaganda, K-pop, texts by Andrei Lankov and Lee Eung-joon, and the romantic notions of unification used by artists, film makers and writers in South Korea during the late 1990s and early 2000s; the ‘Sunshine Policy’ era of soft-line attitude to the North.