Inverted Monuments
Shaun Gladwell

Invert­ed Mon­u­ments evolves a long-stand­ing series of pho­tographs and videos of invert­ed per­for­mances and ges­tures where the result­ing images are, in turn, rotat­ed 180 degrees, to re-ori­ent the body upright with­in an upside-down world. The exhi­bi­tion takes its title from a new video and relat­ed pho­tographs that engage mon­u­ments to colo­nial or Euro­cen­tric power.

Invert­ed Mon­u­ments con­tin­ues the series loose­ly titled Sculp­ture Inverts (2011 – ), where the artist and oth­ers climb upon and hang upside down from stat­ues in Aus­tralian and Euro­pean cities. While for­mal­ly relat­ed, the new works are dis­tinct. The new per­for­mances nec­es­sar­i­ly engage method­olo­gies in response to a post-2020 con­text, where mon­u­ments are sub­ject to increased sur­veil­lance by a State pow­er respond­ing to the zeit­geist of protest.

For Glad­well, protest is an open ges­ture leav­ing no dam­age; a ges­ture towards sym­bol­ic inver­sion and anti-mon­u­men­tal­ism through hybri­dis­ing per­for­mance art, gym­nas­tics, park­our and urban explor­ing. Offer­ing his own body as a scale ref­er­ence to an his­tor­i­cal cor­pus, Invert­ed Mon­u­ments is not sim­ply an irrev­er­ence to the his­tor­i­cal forms of polit­i­cal and cul­tur­al pow­er, but an oppor­tu­ni­ty to see the func­tion­al­i­ty (and even beau­ty) of these rep­re­sen­ta­tions when pic­to­ri­al­ly and sym­bol­i­cal­ly upend­ed. Invert­ed Mon­u­ments uncou­ples the rep­re­sen­ta­tion from its ref­er­ent, the strate­gies of protest from a spe­cif­ic cause. The works in this exhi­bi­tion rather negate the mon­u­men­tal­i­ty of bronze with the time­frame of flesh in tem­po­ral performance.