The Great Plague (2013) is a complex and arresting sculpture in which a solid sugar cast of the artist’s leg, poised on the whitened frame of a single bed, is slowly devoured by ants. The disappearing sugar – perhaps one of the most loaded symbols of exchange, control and violence between settlers and Aboriginal peoples in Australia’s early colonial history – powerfully evokes notions of disintegration and decay, radiating outwards from the body into a broader culture and society.

Jeff Khan, Performance Space. 

 

 

All images: Heidrun Lohr