Interfacial Intimacies

What does it mean to be the absolute essence of yourself without being attached to any of it?

For a long time, philosophers have sought to define the essential aspects of the self. In contemporary culture, exclamations such as “be true to yourself”, “you’re not being yourself” consider that the ‘self’ is defined and a trustworthy container within which you can be found. Emerging theories of selfhood recognise that it isn’t so simple. We know that we can have as many social selves as the people who recognise us. Rather than being fixed and always coherent, an alternative understanding is that our personalities can be participated in as a plethora of parallel processes and possibilities. Of transformation. Of continuous becoming.

Interfacial Intimacies brings together artists who hold and express tenderly the multiple aspects of their selves through a series of portraiture and anti-portraiture. Photography, film, installations, sculpture, textile, and performance in this exhibition explore the tensions of our networked personalities - our shadows, our masks, our shame.

Artists: Bruno Booth, Amrita Hepi, Léuli Eshrāghi, Bhenji Ra, Aleks Danko, Cassie Sullivan, Georgia Morgan, Cigdem Aydemir, David Rosetzky, and Shea Kirk.

Curator: Caine Chennatt

Originally presented by Dark Mofo and the Plimsoll Gallery, University of Tasmania.

Interfacial Intimacies is an exhibition curated by Caine Chennatt, developed by the Plimsoll Gallery and toured by Contemporary Art Tasmania.

The Plimsoll Gallery is supported by the University of Tasmania. Contemporary Art Tasmania is supported by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts funding body, by the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy and is assisted through Arts Tasmania by the Minister for the Arts.

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government’s Visions of Australia program and by the Contemporary Art Tasmania Exhibition Development Fund.

Image above: Amrita Hepi. Scripture for a smoke screen Episode 1: dolphin house, 2022. Dual-channel video installation.
Commissioned by ACMI and Samstag Museum of Art, University of South Australia. Courtesy of the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery.