Visual Art Exhibition Review | Brian Rope
Figa No Face
| Lilah Benetti
Virtual Gaze
| Annabelle McEwen
Photo Access | 18 September to 18 October 2025
Some research told me that anarchive is a term denoting absence in archives. Archival documents, in colonial holdings in particular, are replete with absences, especially as concerns the voices of the colonised. These absences come into sharp view during disagreements when the past is invoked to claim a right of belonging.
Lilah Benetti’s personal website informed me that the Black and Blur Anarchive is a transdisciplinary project building a living, relational archive of Black queer memory, kinship and cultural survival. It values ambiguity, intimacy and incompleteness, resisting singular narratives and centring gender non-conforming ways of being. Shaped by the part of philosophy that is about the study of how we know things, the archive space is where memory and imagination blur and intertwine as mutually sustaining forces.
Black and Blur maps geography relationally, cultivating conditions where Black futures can be dreamed into being. The works displayed are part of artist Benetti’s ongoing transdisciplinary project building a living, relational archive of Black queer memory, kinship and cultural survival across Australia, Africa and the UK. The artist has drawn on conversations in West Africa with elders, activists, artists and others living at the intersection of marginalised Black life, engaging Indigenous knowledge systems that view the body as spiritual and relational rather than singular.
The room sheet for Figa No Face tells us “The image is never neutral. Each photograph carries the weight of what has come before, rippling across borders into the political present, folding into impressions, memories, and projections.”
In these artworks the figure appears as a trace, as memory drifting into myth, as fragments gathering into story. There are prints of analogue film stills (a number of which, appropriately, are significantly blurred), a multi-channel high-definition tape video, and a 15:44 minutes audio installation titled Black and Blur, Frequency Soundscape Portraits. There is much to think about and absorb in this collection of material.
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| Figa No Face installation image © Eunie Kim |
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| Figa No Face installation image © Eunie Kim |
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| Figa No Face installation image © Eunie Kim |
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| 'CIRE [009]', 2024 © Lilah Benetti |
Annabelle McEwen is a multidisciplinary artist. The room sheet for Virtual Gaze tells us that McEwen’s work “interrogates corporate surveillance of the body, where gestures and expressions are observed, hijacked and interpreted by algorithms. Synthesising analogue photography, digital technologies and material processes, the project considers how surveillance systems and algorithmically curated content shape agency, reality and future.”
You very possibly haven’t heard of The Extended Cohn–Kanade (CK+) dataset. It is a large-scale facial expression recognition dataset containing 2,065 images of 215 subjects displaying 8 basic emotions. Way back in 2000, the Cohn-Kanade (CK) database was released for the purpose of promoting research into automatically detecting individual facial expressions. Since then, it has become one of the most widely used testbeds for algorithm development and evaluation.
McEwen has re-staged expressions from the dataset, which is used by governments and corporate bodies to register, stratify, interpret, and store our facial expressions. Applying them to their face using expanded photographic methods such as photogrammetry and gaussian splatting (a technique that enables the conversion of multiple images into a representation of 3D space, which can be used to create images as seen from new angles) the artist has captured a virtual gaze of the body. The resultant images are displayed as sculptural prints, exposing and visualising power structures embedded in contemporary technologies.
There is a print animation with a recorded data centre hum displayed on an iPad. There are artworks printed on a fine-grained paper and on vinyl. Others are etched copper with cast silicon frames. There is a group of works created using Portland cement, graded sand, calcium aluminate cement, calcium carbonate and polyvinyl acetate homopolymer resin. And there is a dye sublimation print on carpet tile. Expressions conveying surprise, anger, disgust, joy, sadness and fear are portrayed in several works. Again, there is much to think about and absorb in these artworks.
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| Virtual Gaze installation image © Eunie Kim |
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| Virtual Gaze installation image © Eunie Kim |
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| Virtual Gaze installation image © Eunie Kim |
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| ‘Silicone Valley Conductor (surprise)’, 2025 © Annabelle McEwen |
This review is also available on the author's blog here.
