Artist Talk: Amrita Hepi

Artist Amrita Hepi joined Gertrude's Artistic Director Mark Feary in conversation, discussing her current exhibition Monumental as well as offering insight into her practice and working methods.

Monumental is a project by Amrita Hepi that casts a central colonial figure within a continual sunrise... or is it a sunset? Through performance the monument is serenaded by sound and dance, then destroyed by paddles and cricket bats, and finally replaced by seven people. By creating a dreamscape of dance and demise, Hepi sets her sights on the historical archive of colonial monuments, making them bodily once more.

Amrita Hepi is an award-winning First Nations choreographer and dancer from Bundjulung (Aus) and Ngāpuhi (NZ) territories. Her mission as an artist is to push the barriers of intersectionality in form and make work that establishes multiple access points through allegory. Her practice at present is interested in forms of hybridity - especially those that arise under empire. An artist with a broad following and reach, her work has taken various forms (film, performance, sculpture, text, lecture, participatory installation), but always begins with the body as a point of archive, memory, dance and resistance.