Contemporary Orientals

Latifa Elmrini

04.09.24 — 03.10.25

Opening: Thursday 4th

6-9pm

Contemporary Orientals is a new body of work that explores a vision of the world viewed through a tunnel. The vignettes that result are a mashup of a bizarre and disjointed visions that fuse the female body with a powerful yet subtle presence of rage. Contemporary Orientals is an interrogation of the way we currently consume media, through a gaze that sees the oriental body as a playground of ideological and psychological violence. The body is distorted, the eyes play tricks on the mind forming overlapping narratives of the bizarre and uncanny.

Latifa Elmrini is a multidisciplinary artist, producer and writer based in Naarm. Through the use of oil painting as a medium and language as a structure, Latifa’s works aims to subvert a traditional Western gaze by challenging societal notions of beauty and power. Latifa is interested in the role that visual storytelling plays in the reversal of the ‘Orientalized’ and colonial gaze by groups that have historically been cast out as the ‘Other’. She composes narratives of strangeness, loss and memory through a re-appropriation of images of Islamic bodies, women and animals using a fragmented style and deliberate absence of perspective.