Sriwhana Spong

An interpretation of the writing of St Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582), who wrote an early conception of interior life titled "The Interior Castle" in 1577. Her castle of the soul was made of clear diamond or crystal and famously contained seven mansions through which one takes journeys of faith. Spong uses Teresa's text to explore the transition between apparent opposites. The central piece of Spong's installation art-work, "Now Spectral, Now Animal"

a hook but no fish explores the lingua ignota (unknown language) received by the twelfth-century German mystic Hildegard von Bingen. The film begins at Disibodenberg in Germany, the site of the monastery where the child Von Bingen was given as a tithe and interned with two other women. The film moves from Hildegard’s place of internment, where she first began to write, to the desktop of an unknown narrator, to the living room of a flat, to a farmhouse, to scenes of birds swarming and roaming through streets in London and Rotterdam. This vertiginous time-travel is accompanied by a score composed by Aotearoa musician Frances Duncan. a hook but no fish speculates whether the lingua ignota is a prophetic language for an arid time such as our own, where rivers run dry, mammals no longer exist, and only technology and tools survive, and asks what Von Bingen’s act of renaming things with a green-sampling word might bring about.


This film animates the insects found in the last painting by the artist’s grandfather, the Balinese painter I Gusti Made Rundu. The swarm imagines ancestry not as linear succession but as an accumulation of energy “charged with potentiality.” 



Sriwhana Spong filmed having-seen-snake in Pittsburgh. In the moment of encountering the snake, Spong's body responded by intuitively entering into a state of stillness and hyper-sensing—as one creature responding to another. In the first part of the film, a more surreal imprint of place and sensory experience is juxtaposed with the interior of the alcohol house at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. This part centres around a new species of snake recently discovered by herpetologist José Pardial in the Amazon. Spong interviews Pardial, who describes the process of designating a name, and reflects on what it means to transfer something from the unspoken into the realm of the spoken. having-seen-snake ends with the song of the Rothschild's mynah recorded at the National Aviary in Pittsburgh. The bird, endemic to Bali, where the artist's father is from, is currently on the brink of extinction due to poaching.

Filmed in Sanur, Bali, The painter-tailor is a family portrait. Drawing together multiple perspectives through the use of 16mm film and HD video that were made by the artist with her relatives and a family dog, the story revolves around the last painting created by Sriwhana Spong’s grandfather, the artist and tailor I Gusti Made Rundu (1918–1993). It is the only work that the family still owns and evokes memories of his life and role as an artist. Setting the work in the surrounds of the family home and alongside photographic albums, the film reveals the social, economic and political contexts that influence art-making. Sriwhana prompts us to think not only about the ways that we make art and images, but also their distribution and the act of looking. Through this lens we can see the effects of colonization in Indonesia and the subsequent impact on traditions of art and image-making.