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Writing credit: Gahee Park et al., Un/learning Australia, exhibition catalogue, Seoul Museum of Art, Artspace Sydney, 2021.

Leyla Stevens’ speculative storytelling across moving image media and photography reworks historical narratives against the grain of dominant representations. In Patiwangi, the death of fragrance (2021), artistic legacies are re-visited, encountered through artworks held in museum storerooms, and collapsed with the time-space of two dancers who exchange and follow one another’s movements. Their attentive gestures are at times mirrored by very different embodied connection – of anonymous gloved hands gently unfurling paintings in the archive. The ceremonial space of a painting has transmuted into the protocols of preservation. Against the tendency for Balinese female artists to be exoticised as muses or rendered invisible (as in the case of uncredited Kamasan female painters in the archival collections Leyla was researching), this new dance centres the stories of female artists and their connections across time and place, poetically resurfacing what lies submerged in the archive. The title refers to the poem, Patiwangi: Renunciation by Indonesian poet Oka Rusmini, which, like Steven’s work, mediates on female ritual histories and processes of transformation.