- Often I work with this idea of counterpoint. It's a theoretical framework, but it's also a visual approach. And it speaks to this idea of bringing two things that are conceived as disparate together in the same space. So my name is Leyla Stevens.

I am an Australian Balinese artist who works mostly in a lens-based practise. I often make work that is quite research-driven. So I focus on responding to histories of place and to material and visual cultures and their archives. And my interest is in on recuperating stories or narratives that lie marginal within dominant histories. So I often work in a expanded documentary genre of filmmaking, you could say, and within that, I insert more staged elements as a way of thinking through a kind of counter history.

This work is called Patiwangi, the death of fragrance. It started off as a response to the representation of female muses in Bali's art canon and really concentrating on a period of history between you could say late colonialism and early modernism in Australia, where you had a number of influential European male painters coming to Bali and establishing this painting lineage. And so out of this period, we see this kind of emergence of this representation of a female dancing body in painting that's heavily exoticised and desired. And so that was the sort of starting point. With that, I sort of staged a dance space in response to that. And then as a counterpoint to that I was looking at Balinese female painters through these collections here in Australia. And it's really thinking about as a way of making those connections and thinking about alternative historiography from kind of passive female muses, to kind of an active voice.

The title of the work draws from a poem by Oka Rusmini and she published this in 1995. And Patiwangi refers to a ritual that happens in Bali when a high-caste woman marries outside of her own caste. And she essentially has to renunciate her cast and give it up. So it means to renunciate. And the poem is drawn from Oka's experience of having to do this ritual. And if you literally translate Patiwangi, Pati means death and wangi means fragrance. So hence that's where the title this work comes from.

For me, this poem kind of spoke to having a really strong woman's voice and negotiating her identity, even at the same time of having to renounce it and working within this very patriarchal system. This work it was initially conceived to be shot and developed in Bali. It had a completely different idea and narrative and sequence of images I was gonna be working with. But what was really nice is that through that shift of having to conceive the work in Australia, there was also the shift of focus of looking at how Indonesian histories are alive and present through the diaspora here in Australia. On this work you see here is a dance piece by two dancers. It was made in collaboration with Melanie Lane and Ade Suharto, and that was shot in Canberra in the old fitters workshop next to the Glassworks Museum. And on the right side here that you see is a series of Balinese artworks and artefacts from two museum collections or one from the Australian museum and one here from the art gallery, New South Wales.

The nice thing about working with the projection screen is that all of a sudden it becomes an object. And with these works, it's a twin projection. So you can see it from both sides. So it encourages this engagement with these videos being able to walk around them, be able to see them from multiple perspectives which is something I really like to sort of break up that narrative even more and also thinking through alternative navigation or historiography of Balinese art in the canon.