Photo Media Exhibition Review | Brian
Rope
The
Bees and the Ledger | Kai Wasikowski
An
Satong Kawaran | George Calvelo
Photo
Access | 15 May – 14 June 2025
Bees in the Ledger is described as being a kind of slow family work. Whilst you may well know little about the artist’s grandmother, Natalia Broadhurst, who is the central figure in the story presented here, you very likely know a lot about other members of his family. I’ll just mention that both his parents are excellent photo media artists, and his actress sister has been known to use her camera on a film set between takes.
So where does the exhibition’s title come from? The exhibition catalogue tells us that bees remember and that a ledger works in much the same way, structuring things so we can return to names, to dates, to whatever else we've recorded in them. The artist suggests that a ledger is a hive of sorts, with each entry being akin to a cell in a beehive, storing things which might otherwise not stay within our memories. And of course it is absolutely true that photography creates contents for a ledger - a place where we store images which remind us of what we saw, of things that we were doing, or places we had visited.
In this exhibition, Kai Wasikowski share parts of his grandmothers somewhat abandoned European life, abandoned when she migrated - arriving in Australia on a cargo ship in the 1970s. There are two large walls of photographs - one of domestic scenes, the other a variety. On one wall the images are displayed in a grid, on the other as a sequence. Careful examination allows us to take in what is being shared.
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| Kai Wasikowski, from the series 'The Bees and the Ledger,' 2024 |
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| Kai Wasikowski, from the series 'The Bees and the Ledger,' 2024 |
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| Kai Wasikowski, from the series 'The Bees and the Ledger,' 2024 |
The
second exhibition here is by George Calvelo, previously a photojournalist in
the Philippines and currently a documentary photographer based in Canberra. His
artist bio tells us his personal work now “reflects years of unprocessed
thoughts stemming from witnessing systemic disinformation and simmering
societal disorder in his native country.”
The title of this exhibition An Satong Kawaran translates to “In Our Absence.” As with the companion exhibition, this show is about a life left behind in another country and a new life emerging in Australia.
Before leaving his home country Calvelo exposed several rolls of film. His intention was to re-expose them after he arrived in Australia. However, using the slow deliberate process of analogue photography, he did something different from photojournalism. He photographed his memories, familiar places, his childhood home, and final moments in places where he'd said his personal goodbyes. Later, looking at overlapping images on his developed films he found it hard to cut the frames. Why? Because he felt that he was looking at a dream like state of transition, where his sense of home was evolving because of the new place that he was now living.
So what we see in this exhibition are images where photographs captured in his new home have been overlapped with photographs from his old home. The result is some most extraordinary creations. Two of the archival inkjet prints are very large - one is 100 by 340 cm, another 130 by 324 cm. The quality of these prints is superb.
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| George Calvelo, from the series 'An Satong Kawaran,’ 2023/2024 |
In
addition to the prints, the exhibition includes two other pieces. Overlaid
negative strips on a light box enable us to think about his “dream-like state”.
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| Installation image © Eunie Kim |
And there is a 06:17 length video which is a compilation of Calvelo’s visual diary and past assignments. This beautifully shows us something of where this artist has been, what he’s heard, what he saw, and how he moved through the moments displayed. There are dreamlike pieces, photojournalistic images of events during periods of martial law, glorious portrayals of the Philippines countryside, and much more.
This review is also available on the author's own blog here.
