Las Hormigas/The Ants

Latinx visual artist and filmmaker Pilar Mata Dupont presents a vivid exploration of intergenerational storytelling and the fragmentation of memory in Las Hormigas/The Ants told across video, photography, and performance.  Influenced by her background and upbringing in the settler-colonial states of Brunei, Argentina and Australia, Mata Dupont uses dark, absurdist humour to reflect on her Argentinian family’s complicated past, and how trauma manifests over large geographical and temporal distances. Las Hormigas will be the most ambitious iteration of her highly personal body of work in which she attempts to distil and reconcile varying interpretations of her family’s histories and memories of 20th-century Argentina. 

Across Las Hormigas, Mata Dupont’s works play out the complex, constantly unfolding process of remembering, forgetting, and rewriting history. The exhibition debuts a new performance and video installation drawing from the artist’s rich archive of her family’s history, assembled over a period of almost ten years. Presented in the adjoining galleries is La Maruja (2021) – a powerful series of large-scale photographs and a single-channel video, continuing her theatrical and cinematic explorations of magic realism, memory, trauma, motherhood, and the body. 

Image: Pilar Mata Dupont, La Maruja: La Mano, 2021, photo print, acrylic face mounted on aluminium, 20 x 90cm. Photography production by Tony Nathan at Studio OPPA. Image courtesy the artist and MOORE CONTEMPORARY.