Paean Sarkar· English Medium

24.06.2023 - 01.07.2023

11am Saturday, 24th of June: Paean Sarkar and Naomi Blacklock in Conversation

Paean Sarkar, English Medium, Installation View.

English Medium emerges from a collaborative process between Paean Sarkar and her mother, Pamela. Paean has written reflections on her relationship to the Bengali language and surrounding ideas, in amateurish Bengali, which her mother then corrects in red pen.

Paean Sarkar is a Meanjin-based conceptual artist, working self-reflexively to analyse the institutional, cultural and ideological frameworks within which her art practice operates. She often recontextualises the aesthetic language and methodologies of 1960s Conceptual Art to articulate her experience of alterity, navigating cultural hybridity and artist-hood as a second generation (Bengali) Indian immigrant in Australia. Investigations and meditations on language have thus anchored her understanding of ‘self’ in relation to the mechanisms of her practice.

Download the room sheet here.

Opening Event: Saturday, 24th of June, 11am:
Paean Sarkar in conversation with Naomi Blacklock

Naomi Blacklock is an artist based in Meanjin (Brisbane), Australia whose practice maps the nexus of embodied performance, cultural heritage and gender identity. Working across a range of media, from experimental sound and video installation to performance and sculpture, her work creatively examines the mythologies, archetypes and harmful histories of gender and cultural identity through an intersectional feminist lens.

In 2019 Naomi was awarded her Doctorate of Philosophy from Queensland University of Technology for her thesis Conjuring Alterity: Refiguring the Witch and The Female Scream in Contemporary Art. Her work has been presented at Hobart’s Art Festival, Dark Mofo and in numerous Galleries and Artist-Run Initiatives both locally and nationally. With broad experience in the Visual Arts sector, Naomi is a current Board Member of Merto Arts and has served as the Director of Boxcopy Contemporary Art Space and a Founding Co-Director of Clutch Collective ARI (2016).