Above: Rosngela Renn, Fire (from the Penitentiary Museum of Sao Paolo files) 19961999

Opposite: Fiona Pardington, Portrait of a life cast of Koe, Timor 2010

from Ahua: A beautiful hesitation series

REPARATIVE AESTHETICS:
Rosngela Renn and
Fiona Pardington
CURATED BY SUSAN BEST

UNIVERSITY ART GALLERY

THE UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY

Rosngela Renn, Three Holes (from the Penitentiary Museum of So Paolo files) 19961999

Back to front: The reparative portraits of

Rosngela Renn and Fiona Pardington
SUSAN BEST, CURATOR

Memory is variable and manipulable; I even think it has to be manipulated so that it

becomes tolerable. 1
Rosngela Renn
Its easy to make beautiful photographs; its hard to make photographs of really beautiful
ideas. 2
Fiona Pardington

his exhibition brings together the work of two photographers, Fiona Pardington and
Rosngela Renn, who are contributing to the trend known as the archival turn in contemporary
art.3 To date, the critical literature on this turn has paid little attention to artists from the southern
hemisphere Renn is from Brazil, Pardington from New Zealand. Hence, their unusual reparative
approach to shameful histories has passed unnoticed.
I am borrowing the idea of a reparative approach from queer theorist, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Sedgwick,
in turn, borrows the idea of a reparative position or orientation from psychoanalyst, Melanie Klein, for
whom the term signifies a capacity to deal with ambivalence, and to incorporate both positive and
negative feelings. The reparative position is not, then, redemptive or restorative in the straightforward
way one might suppose.
For Sedgwick, a reparative motive seeks pleasure rather than the avoidance of shame, but it also signals
the capacity to assimilate the consequences of destruction and violence. Sedgwick advocates reparative
interpretations of cultural material in place of the much more common paranoid interpretations (another
key Kleinian term). She explains that paranoid interpretations routinely adopt a posture of suspicion and
operate as a kind of exposure of traces of oppression or injustice.4 Sedgwick argues paranoid suspicion
is central to current critical practice in the humanities and that it is propelled by the desire on the part of
theorists and critics to avoid surprise, shame, and humiliation.
In contemporary art, this approach is typical of the anti-aesthetic tradition and identity politics art, which
favour critique and the exposure of wrong-doing. By privileging critique over aesthetic engagement, the
1 Rosngela Renn in Fernando C. Boppr, Imemorial e desidentificado: Entrevista com Rosngela Renn 3. http://www.
fernandoboppre.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/IMEMORIAL-E-DESIDENTIFICADO-ENTREVISTA-COMROS%C3%82NGELA-RENN%C3%93.pdf accessed October 2014. My translation.
2 Fiona Pardington cited in Rhana Devenport, Foreword, Fiona Pardington: The Pressure of Sunlight Falling, ed. Kriselle Baker and
Elizabeth Rankin (Dunedin: Otago UP in association with Govett-Brewster Art Gallery and Two Rooms Gallery, 2011) 6.
3 See Hal Foster, An Archival Impulse, October 110 (2004): 3-22. See also, Beatrice von Bismarck, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Hans
Ulrich Obrist et al., eds, Interarchive: Archival Practices and Sites in the Contemporary Art Field (Kln: Walter Knig, 2002); Okwui
Enwezor, Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art, exh. cat. (New York: International Center of Photography,
2008); Sven Spieker, The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy (Cambridge, Mass: MIT P, 2008); Krzysztof Pijarski, ed. The Archive
as Project (Warsaw: Archeologia Fotografii, 2011); and Ernst van Alphen, Staging the Archive: Art and Photography in the Age of
Mass Media (London: Reaktion, 2014).
4 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, Youre so Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is
About You, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke UP, 2003) 139.

anti-aesthetic tradition rejects the importance

of traditional aesthetic concerns such as beauty,
feeling, expression and judgment. In contrast,
the two artists in this exhibition use a range of
complex aesthetic strategies to engage audiences
with histories of oppression and injustice, and to
temper, and at times transform, the feelings of
shame that would normally accompany them. In
this essay, I address just some of these strategies.
The photographs in this exhibition by Pardington
are drawn from her series, Ahua: A Beautiful
Hesitation, comprised of ten photographs, and
exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art,
Sydney as part of the 17th Biennale of Sydney
in 2010. This ravishingly beautiful sequence of
photographs shows some of the fifty life casts of
the people of Oceania taken in the early part of
the 19th century on one of the last European
so-called voyages of discovery.
The casts are now archival objects, held in
French ethnographic museums, but they were
originally intended to illustrate a hierarchical
and deeply racist classification of the peoples
of the Pacific. The series has a deeply personal
resonance for Pardington, included amongst
the images are some of her Maori ancestors
from her iwi or tribe, Ngai Tahu. Given this
connection, Pardington adopts what she calls
an animistic Maori perspective on these
anthropological artefacts that might otherwise
be regarded as embarrassing or shameful relics
of colonial thinking.5 The power of the portraits
partly derives from this underpinning philosophy:
Pardington has photographed inanimate objects
as if they are alive. She describes her process
as looking for the right time when the image
seems to leap into life, the beauty coalesces
with the technical plane of the ghost in the
machine and the demi-urge of pixels.6 The

uncanny vitality of the resulting portraits partly

undoes their shameful history, augmenting the
other tactics Pardington uses to underscore her
reparative approach: the individualisation of each
sitter through the emphasis on their names; the
tranquillity of their collective demeanour; the use
of large scale and the consequent diminution of
the beholder.
Two further tactics enable guilt and shame
to be navigated in reparative ways. First, the
shame of the oppressed or colonised is not in
play in Pardingtons work. Or, if shame is always
residually associated with subjugation, then it is
has been very successfully transduced into an
installation of great beauty and complexity about
this difficult history, suggesting the ascendancy
of pleasure and surprise advocated by Sedgwick.
In other words, shameful events of the past
are revisited rather than repudiated in line with
the core strategy for transforming shame that
Sedgwick identifies in the work of Henry James.7
Secondly, Pardington has not adopted the
position of victim, thereby complicating the
typical way we think about colonialism and its
aftermath. It is instructive to think about how the
casts could have been presented, if Pardington
had wanted to foreground that position and
to make use of the typical art strategies of
repudiation associated with identity politics,
such as ideologue critique. If this had been her
aim, she could have emphasised the original
purpose of the casts. Following the example of
African American artist Carrie Mae Weems, racist
descriptions from the voyage could have been
superimposed onto the images to limit the way
in which the casts are perceived. Adopting this
approach would underscore the guilt and shame
of the western viewer, both perpetrator and
beneficiary of this world view.

5 Fiona Pardington,I am the Animist, Towards a Kaupapa of Ancestral Power and Talk, Doctor of Fine Arts, Auckland University,
2013, n.p.
6 Pardington cited in Kriselle Baker, The Truth of Lineage Time and Te Moko, Fiona Pardington: The Pressure of Sunlight Falling, 27.
7 Sedgwick, Shame, Theatricality, and Queer Performativity: Henry Jamess The Art of the Novel, Touching Feeling, 44.

Alternatively, she might have followed the

approach that Sianne Ngai dubs the uplift
aesthetic.8 Filling in the blanks of racial identity
with positive representations that contest
negative stereotypes another familiar strategy
from the recent history of feminist, queer and
post-colonial art. To give just one example, the
Australia indigenous artist Brook Andrew has
uplifted a typical ethnographic photograph of
an Aboriginal man by amplifying body decorations
and adding across his chest the text sexy and
dangerous. Andrew thereby directs the viewer
towards a positive reading of the photograph
as surely as ideology critique underscores
the negative.
Pardingtons reparative method can be
understood as combining these two approaches
while also reinventing them. Insofar as she asserts
an alternative animistic world-view, the Ahua
series makes amends in a straightforward manner
like the uplift aesthetic. However, racial identity as
such is not the principle concern, rather it is the
beautiful idea of a Maori life principle joining the
past to the present. This new understanding of
history and patrimony sits alongside the colonial
legacy rather than displacing it, ensuring that the
damage of the past is not forgotten. The room
brochure for The Pressure of Sunlight Falling well
captures this delicately balanced ambivalence:
the artist investigate[s] museum collections
as imperfect yet infinitely precious archives of
cultural memory.9 Imperfect, and yet precious,
perfectly describes the reparative approach.
Renn also constructed her series Vulgo [Alias]
(1998) from archival resources a collection of
glass plate images, photographs and paintings
in the So Paulo State Penitentiary Museum.
She became aware of this store of images
when her gallerist, Marcantnio Vilaa, sent

her a newspaper article about the collection.

She reports that the museum is not a museum
as such; rather it is a room full of broken and
mouldy glass plate negatives stacked in boxes.10
The photographs she found there, thousands
of portraits of prisoners taken between 1920
and 1940, were destined for oblivion before she
intervened, restoring the images at her own
expense and instructing staff on maintenance.
There was no documentation in the museum to
identify the prisoners, apart from some material
on a few famous prisoners. She describes her
fascination with this moment of amnesia.11 She
explains: I was looking at thousands of portraits
that were testimonies to nothing, twice forgotten
faces with numbers and without names.12 The
testimonial uselessness of such images is part of
their appeal for Renn; these images on the brink
of extinction are brought back into visibility by her,
provoking us to make sense of them.
From this resource, which she calls a huge
collection of ghosts, she made a series that
focused on the documentation of tattoos, Cicatriz
[Scars], and Vulgo which mostly focuses on the
backs of prisoners heads.13 The photographs are
sometimes exhibited with barely legible written
texts about photography that she has collected
from newspaper articles. She picked texts with
themes that relate to the position of the convict,
rather than being specifically about them:
oppression, submission, anonymity, non-identity
and confinement.14
For Vulgo, Renn selected from the archive
very eccentric images of convicts: they focus
specifically on the crowns of the prisoners heads
and the way the close-cropped hair radiates
outwards from there, creating cowlicks whose
individual patterns are supposedly as unique as
the whorls of a finger print. According to Renn,

8 Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2005) 177.
9 Room Brochure, Fiona Pardington, The Pressure of Sunlight Falling, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, 11 June28 August 2011, n.p.
10 Renn in Melissa Chiu, Rosngela Renn Interview, Rosngela Renn, Vulgo [Alias], ed. Melissa Chiu, exh. cat. (Kingswood:
University of Western Sydney, 1999) 44.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid., 42.

this strange view of hair patterns was present

in only 40 images out of the 5,000 photographs
preserved in the archive. Most images were more
conventional identification shots: mug shots,
double effigy (front and profile), as well as naked
front, back and profile. The images of the backs of
heads were not paired with face shots, suggesting
that their purpose was not identificatory.
Renn has transformed the original shots into
very large format photographs with a delicate rose
colouration directing the eye towards the cowlick
patterns of scalp and hair. These photographs
are warmed in tone both literally and figuratively.
As Renn notes, there is an eroticisation of the
images through this infusion of the colours of
flesh and blood.15 The glossy surface of the large
prints adds to the sensualisation of men, hair and
skin, while the reproduction of all the marks of
photographic ageing scratches, dissolution and
discolouration preserves the mortality of the
image itself.
The mens individuality is underscored by the
quirky nicknames that Renn has given them,
based on the pictures made by the hair on their
heads. Three Holes, for example, is the prisoner
with three holes like coconut eyes on the back
of his head. One could also read the holes a little
differently by combining the round bald patch
on his head with the effects of photographic
deterioration, which has taken two rounded
chips out of the top of his head. The prisoner
called Whip has a cat of nine tails depicted on
his crown. Scorpion, Twister, Fire and Phoenix,
similarly all show recognisable likenesses of these
things on the prisoners scalps. This matching of
nickname or alias with the highlighted whorls of
hair has a gentle humour, while also connoting
power: whips, fire, scorpions are all commanding,
forceful names.

With their nicknames or aliases restored, or rather

invented by Renn, the prisoners are humanised
but also figured as possibly dangerous. The scale
of the image, which is well over life size, adds to
this sense of power and overblown masculinity.
The scale is slightly intimidating thereby also
conveying the power or machismo of these
possibly dangerous, or even notorious convicts.
The softening of the image, through humour
and colour, is thus not at the expense of the
mens empowerment or eroticisation. Renn
thereby restores dignity to these men who have
been exposed to what Allan Sekula calls the
repressive regime of police photography.16 The
prisoners objectification by that surveillant power
is both evident and yet profoundly complicated
by Renns reparative approach to their
re-presentation.
The work of these two artists makes us look
again at the treatment of the vulnerable their
objectification in the interests of science and/
or security while also surprising us with their
sensuous depictions of anthropological specimens
and the convict body. In this way, their work
emphasises pleasure and aesthetic complexity,
while also registering the traces of oppression.
The two series thereby perfectly embody Melanie
Kleins reparative or depressive phase by holding
together in exquisite tension, past and present,
damage and repair.

15 Ibid., 45.
16 Allan Sekula, The Body and the Archive, October 39 (Winter 1986): 6, 10, 56.

BIOGRAPHIES
Rosngela Renn was born in 1962 in belo horizonte, brazil and lives and works in rio de janeiro. Renn graduated in architecture
from the federal university of minas gerais, belo horizonte in 1986, and in visual arts from the escola guignardi, belo horizonte in
1987. In 1997 she received an arts doctorate from the school of communications and arts of the university of so paulo.
Renn has exhibited extensively internationally and her work is held in numerous collections including the art institute, chicago;
cisneros collection, caracas/new york; instituto inhotim, inhotim; museo nacional centro de arte reina sofia, madrid; museum of
contemporary art, chicago; museum of contemporary art, los angeles; Museum of modern art, new york; museum of modern
art, rio de janeiro; solomon r. Guggenheim museum, New York; Stedelijk museum, amsterdam and the tate modern, london
among others.
Fiona pardington was born 1961 in devonport, auckland and is of maori (kai tahu, kati mamoe, kati waewae) and scottish
ancestry. Pardington received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the elam school of fine arts in 1984. In 2003 she was awarded a master
of fine arts in photography followed in 2013 by a doctor of fine arts from the university of auckland.
Pardington has exhibited widely internationally and recent exhibitions include contact at the frankfurter kunstverein, germany in
2012, the first kyiv international biennale, ukraine in 2012 and the 17th biennale of sydney in 2010. Her work is represented in several
major museum collections including the auckland art gallery, auckland; christchurch art gallery, christchurch; govett brewster art
gallery, new plymouth; muse du quai branly, paris; national gallery of art, washington d.C; national gallery of canada, ottawa;
national gallery of victoria, melbourne; museum of new zealand te papa tongarewa, wellington; the university of auckland,
auckland; the university of sydney, sydney and queensland art gallery | gallery of modern art, brisbane.
Susan Best teaches art history at Griffith University, where she is professor of art theory and fine art. She is the author of
Visualizing Feeling: Affect and the Feminine Avant-garde (2011). Her book Reparative Aesthetics: Witnessing in Contemporary Art
Photography is forthcoming from Bloomsbury in 2016.

LIST OF WORKS
Rosngela Renn

Fiona Pardington

* Double Crown (from the Penitentiary

Museum of So Paolo files) 19961999

Portrait of a life-cast of Jules Sebastien

Cesar Dumont dUrville
from Ahua: A beautiful hesitation series
2010
archival pigment inks on Hahnemhle
308gsm photo rag paper
146 x 110cm
Purchased 2010 with a special allocation
from the Queensland Art Gallery
Foundation
Courtesy of the Musee Flaubert
dHistoire de la Medecine, Rouen, France

Down (from the Penitentiary Museum

of So Paolo files) 19961999
* Fire (from the Penitentiary Museum
of So Paolo files) 19961999
Number (from the Penitentiary Museum
of So Paolo files) 19961999
* Phoenix (from the Penitentiary
Museum of So Paolo files) 19961999
Scar (from the Penitentiary Museum
of So Paolo files) 19961999
* Scorpion (from the Penitentiary
Museum of So Paolo files) 19961999
* Three Holes (from the Penitentiary
Museum of So Paolo files) 19961999
Trockel (from the Penitentiary Museum
of So Paolo files) 19961999
* Volcan (from the Penitentiary Museum
of So Paolo files) 19961999
* Whip (from the Penitentiary Museum
of So Paolo files) 19961999
All works by Rosngela Renn are
Novajet prints on vinyl
112 x 155 cm
On loan from University of Western
Sydney, Art Collection

* Portrait of a life cast of Koe, Timor

2010
from Ahua: A beautiful hesitation series
archival inks on Epson hot press natural
320gsm paper
146 x 110 cm
Purchased with funds from the Renshaw
bequest 2014
University of Sydney Art Collection
UA2014.16
Courtesy of the Musee de lHomme
(Musee National dHistoire Naturelle)
Paris, France
* Portrait of a life cast of Orion, Papua
New Guinea 2010
from Ahua: A beautiful hesitation series
archival pigment inks on Hahnemhle
308gsm photo rag paper
146 x 110 cm
Purchased 2010 with a special allocation
from the Queensland Art Gallery
Foundation
Courtesy of the Musee de lHomme
(Musee National dHistoire Naturelle)
Paris, France
* Portrait of a life cast of Pitani,
Solomon Islands 2010
from Ahua: A beautiful hesitation series
archival pigment inks on Hahnemhle
308gsm photo rag paper
146 x 110 cm
Purchased 2010 with a special allocation
from the Queensland Art Gallery
Foundation
Courtesy of the Musee de lHomme
(Musee National dHistoire Naturelle)
Paris, France

* Portrait of a life cast of Tou Taloa,

Samoa 2010
from Ahua: A beautiful hesitation series
archival pigment inks on Hahnemhle
308gsm photo rag paper
146 x 110 cm
Purchased 2010 with a special allocation
from the Queensland Art Gallery
Foundation
Courtesy of the Musee de lHomme
(Musee National dHistoire Naturelle)
Paris, France
* Portrait of a life cast of Matoua Tawai,
Aotearoa/New Zealand
from Ahua: A beautiful hesitation series
2010
archival pigments on 308gsm
Hahnemuhle photo rag paper
146 x 110cm
Purchased with funds from the Renshaw
bequest 2014
University of Sydney Art Collection
UA2014.17
Courtesy: Musee de lHomme (Musee
National dHistoire Naturelle), Paris
Portrait of a life-cast of Matoua Tawai,
Aotearoa/New Zealand
from Ahua: A beautiful hesitation series
2010
archival pigment inks on Hahnemhle
308gsm photo rag paper
146 x 110cm
Purchased 2010 with a special allocation
from the Queensland Art Gallery
Foundation
Courtesy of the Musee de lHomme
(Musee National dHistoire Naturelle),
Paris, France
* on exhibition at the University Art
Gallery, the University of Sydney

Front cover: Fiona Pardington, Portrait of a life-cast of Matoua Tawai, Aotearoa/New Zealand
from Ahua: A beautiful hesitation series 2010

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Reparative aesthetics: Rosngela Renn and Fiona Pardington is the fourth exhibition in our celebration of the 40th Anniversary of
International Womens Year.
This exhibition would not have been possible without the enthusiasm of the artists Rosngela Renn and Fiona Pardington and our
guest curator Professor Susan Best.
With thanks to the Sydney University Museums led by David Ellis for their support of the project. Thanks again to Peter Thorn for the
elegant design of this publication.
With gratitude to our lenders Monica McMahon, Curator, University of Western Sydney Art Collection and Chris Saines, CNZM,
Director, as well as former Curatorial Manager, Asian and Pacific Art, Russell Storer from Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art.
We are delighted to partner with Griffith University Art Gallery on this exhibition. Many thanks to Angela Goddard, Director, Griffith
Artworks and Professor Derrick Cherrie, Director, Queensland College of Art, from Griffith University.
Susan Best would like to thank the Australia Council for the Arts for generous funding of the research that underpins this exhibition,
the artists Fiona Pardington and Rosngela Renn, Angela Goddard, and Ann Stephen, Katrina Liberiou and Luke Parker from Sydney
University Museums.
PUBLIC PROGRAM
1 August 2015, 23.30 pm
Exhibition talk, University Art Gallery, the University of Sydney
EXHIBITION TOUR
Griffith University Art Gallery
30 April 2 July 2016
www.griffith.edu.au/visual-creative-arts/griffith-artworks
Griffith University Art Gallery
Queensland College of Art
226 Grey Street
South Bank QLD

Published in conjunction with the exhibition

Reparative aesthetics : Rosngela Renn and Fiona Pardington
University Art Gallery, The University of Sydney 4 July 25 September 2015
Curator: Susan Best
Curatorial Assistant: Katrina Liberiou
Catalogue:
Authors: Susan Best
Editors: Ann Stephen, Luke Parker
Graphic design and print production: Peter Thorn
Printed using Forestry Stewardship Council approved paper
Published by University Art Gallery, The University of Sydney
University Art Gallery, artist and authors 2015
This catalogue is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act
1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry
Creator: Best, Susan, author.
Title:
Reparative aesthetics : Rosngela Renn and Fiona Pardington / Susan Best.
ISBN: 9781742103570 (paperback)
Subjects: Renn, Rosngela, 1962Exhibitions.

Pardington, Fiona, 1961Exhibitions.

Photography, ArtisticExhibitions.

Art and historyExhibitions.
Aesthetics.
Dewey Number: 779.074

REPARATIVE AESTHETICS: Rosngela Renn and Fiona Pardington