Caves

Photodoubles is Kristina Tsoulis-Reay’s first exhibition in dialogue with her filmmaker mother’s work. For this new series of paintings Kristina has sourced images from Athina Tsoulis’s short film A Bitter Song (1990), made for Te Reo Tātaki o Aotearoa (Television New Zealand). The film is an autobiographical depiction of Athina’s experiences as a child, migrating in the 1950s from Varvasena Greece to Tarntanya (Adelaide). As a child Kristina was present on set, watching as amateur and professional actors reenacted her mother’s childhood. Figures from Tāmaki Makaurau’s small Greek community approximated close relatives, while her sister and cousin stood-in for their mothers. Kristina occasionally acted as an ‘extra.’

In Photodoubles, a range of painted gestures gather dislocated, intergenerational events into singular images. The extraction of still images from the film produces, en abyme, endless sensations, as the painter recollects her childhood reception of her mother’s memories from unknown times and places. In the re-witnessing of the witnessing of another’s memories, the paintings appear faithful, yet they are inherently duplicitous. Forms and likenesses hover between representation and intangibility presenting a slippery and complicated image of the past.