Shoufay Derz

Born in Australia to a Taiwanese mother and German father, Shoufay Derz explores themes of the fragility of existence and the possibility/impossibility of communication across languages and cultures. The photographic and video works exhibited in Home and Away grew out of a project that brought indigenous history, water research scientists and artists together at Gulgadya Muru, a wild area of the Manly Dam Reserve in Sydney and then continued in Berlin. For Ritual of Eels: Loving the Alien her participants were painted bright, chromakey green and photographed submerged in the water, only their heads visible between the lily pads. For Derz the figure of the ‘alien’ represents the possibility of transformation. It also alludes to the ‘illegal alien’, the undocumented, the unwelcome, the foreigner – the ‘other’. Derz sometimes says her works are like ‘bad poems’– grasping at the ineffable, the unsayable. She imagines fragile, mysterious threads of connection and belonging that tie us to the natural world and to each other.

Watch Shoufay Derz’s interview with curators Luise Guest and Jennifer Yang