With recognition for her pioneering practice long overdue, this scholarly monograph is the first survey of one of Australia’s leading photo-media artists, Eugenia Raskopoulos. Raskopoulos’ cultural background has informed more than three decades of inventive, evolving bodies of work that span across video photo-media, installation and photography.
Born in the Czech Republic to Greek parents before migrating from Greece to Australia in 1963, Raskopoulos has long sustained a focused and fruitful critique of language. In Vestiges of the Tongue we see her visualising language’s slippages through performances of translation, interrogating words and their impact on the body, and tracing contemporary communication as it enters the realms of data and surveillance.
Beautifully designed and produced as a cloth-bound a hardcover volume, Vestiges of the Tongue is a stylish and immersive exploration into Raskopoulos’ world. Early works such as the neon ‘No never means yes’, emblazoned on the wall of a girl’s bedroom, and the performance of the word ‘democracy’, written by the artist’s foot in urine, are just two examples from an oeuvre that, decades on, appears both consistently engaged with the politics of its time and, here reconsidered by ten leading scholars and curators, newly resonant in the social context of today.
