Julie Rrap

Julie Rrap has, for four decades, been working at the forefront of feminist practice in Australia, unpicking and complicating the relationships between the gaze, agency, and representation of gendered bodies in contemporary and historical art practices. Known widely for her photographic, sculptural, and media work, a new exhibition at ARC ONE Gallery draws attention to the under-examined performative elements of Rrap's practice, and the destabilised boundary between performance work and its documentation in an exhibition context.

In front of Rrap’s Secret Strategies, Ideal Spaces series, 1987, viewers with an archival impulse might find themselves looking for wall text inside, or at the very least around, the image. In this photographic series, Rrap moves – usually naked to some degree, and often with markings on her body – in front of drawn reproductions of work from French museum collections, which she encountered during a Power Cité International des Arts residency in 1987. We might be looking, that is, for breadcrumbs along Rrap’s bibliographic trail, asking,”What are these works she’s standing, sitting, laying, or moving in front of?”

Though this question might be the result of good curatorial or art historical training, or more simply the training in “looking at art” afforded us as a public by our cultural institutions, Rrap doesn’t give us easy answers. Rather, as Anne Marsh suggests in a catalogue essay, the “heightened performativity” of this series draws focus away from the works Rrap intervenes in, and further towards the intervention itself, and the many stabilities – of the gaze, of power, of performance and its documented record – that Rrap disrupts in the work. March suggests that this is a kind of thieving, or trickster-ism, and it’s one performed with a sense of material satisfaction and abandon.

Rrap’s intervention was, in part, to animate the women “trapped” in this work – beneath the eye and the brush of painter, historian, viewer, and institution – and exposures on the photographic images in this series are long enough to capture the blur of movement as Rrap’s body stretches, reaches, or rotates. Many of the women depicted in the “source” artworks, themselves, would have been writhing or running from physical danger, though even those who are holding still poses are often contorted: the odalisque turning her head to look over her inhumanly long spine like a corkscrew, or the seated woman arranging her thighs for the painter. So, as much as Rrap’s work is to exercise an agency and a force of power denied the feminine subjects of her source paintings, it may also be to trouble the status of the still image as still, and to highlight the embodied, performative aspects of her practice. 

At ARC ONE, these works from 1987 are shown alongside a new video work, Drawn Out, 2022, where Rrap draws her naked body in charcoal. Here, the categories of the drawn and the drawer flicker into and out of each other – as the categories of subject and object do in so much of Rrap’s most well-known photographic work. With Rrap moving over a sheet of paper attached to the floor in Drawn Out, there is a literal re-animation of significant ideas that Rrap has been at the forefront of in Australian feminist art practice since the 1970s, with fresh attention drawn to the ageing (woman’s) body and the direction and manner of progress over this end of the twentieth century and the start of the twenty-first. This show appears concurrently with Rrap’s work at the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Free/State. 

EXHIBITION 
Julie Rrap: Drawn Out 1987/2022
15 February – 19 March 2022
ARC ONE Gallery, Melbourne