Live with Sriwhana Spong

6 May 2020

An online conversation between visual artist and dancer Sriwhana Spong and RIA curator Ned McConnell. They discuss her research and practice, including the importance of creating your own sense of place, Gamelan orchestras and Medieval female mystics.

This event is part of a series of online conversations, co-hosted by our organisation and Performance Exchange in 2020. The webcast talks feature artists, curators and other cultural practitioners engaged in live work.

As organisations both being dedicated to performance and event-based art practices, this collaboration is born from the need to keep supporting these practices, perhaps now more urgently than ever. In creating this platform together, we want to share artistic projects and ideas with our audiences, whilst thinking through different cultural infrastructure that works for performance in times of social isolation.

Roberts Institute of Art

Sriwhana Spong, Tasseography of a Rat's Nest (extended), 2018.

Courtesy the artist, Michael Lett and Pump House Gallery. Photo: Damian Griffiths

Sriwhana Spong

Sriwhana Spong is an artist of New Zealand and Indonesian descent currently living and working in London. She is interested in the fertile margins and the rich edges where things meet, working across various mediums such as sculpture, film, writing, performance, dance, and sound.

Her materials are often inspired by the everyday materials used in Balinese offerings—assemblages that are not made to last and that incorporate formal patterns with informal additions of what is close at hand. Her large silk banners dyed in Fanta, Coca-cola, and tea function more than unalloyed reproaches of global homogeneity through colonisation and capitalism, but also consider the power of collective experience by acknowledging these consumed substances’ effect as being at once toxic and joyous. Her ever-expanding ‘personal orchestra’, an ongoing series of instruments, explores the writing of place, history, and the body through sound.

The formal and informal also meet in her sculptures and films where experiential knowledge, autobiography, and fiction are entangled with carefully researched materials and forms that reflect their particular cultural contexts and sources. Here Spong also draws on the writings of female medieval mystics, attempting to translate their ‘mystic style’—a preference for experiential knowledge over institutionalised knowledge, autobiography, fiction, close observation, and the everyday—into films and sculptures that explore the relationship of the body to language, how it is written, and how it exceeds and escapes this inscribing.

Performance Exchange


Performance Exchange is a dispersed performance project across commercial galleries in London, some of which will also be hosting performances from international galleries in July 2020.

Highlighting the work done by commercial galleries to support multi-disciplinary and performance practice, Performance Exchange will create new forms of support for collecting performance art through a three day programme of presentations combined with detailed acquisition information for each work on an innovative digital platform.