Shaun Gladwell is a multidisciplinary artist who represented Australia at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009. For him, the body is the primary medium of creation, and the artist is a « choreographer » in the etymological sense — one who writes with the body. In a single gesture, he fuses two artistic registers, weaving together movement-based and performative disciplines to probe the function and meaning of spaces, whether urban, wild, or rendered in augmented reality. By extension, his video works deploy an aesthetic language that symbolically upends public space, cultural institutions, and the structures of power they embody. What does the force of play, and the labyrinthine unfolding of geopolitical conflict, reveal about our experience of the social, political, and collective body in contemporary societies?

« The dancing body, the suspended body, the mechanical body, the motorcyclist’s body, the virtuoso body, the combative body — all these possible bodies converge in a performative poetics of the body: enacted, calculated, mastered, choreographed, slowed down, filmed. » — Barbara Polla