Past Residents Pilar Mata Dupont
Pilar Mata Dupont (b. 1981, Australia) is an artist based between Perth, Australia and Amsterdam, The Netherlands, who works primarily in film, photography and performance. She has recently returned to her solo practice after a five year hiatus during which she concentrated on her collaborations with Tarryn Gill and with Hold Your Horses.
Mata Dupont is interested in re-creating or re-imagining memories or histories based on fragments of texts, photographs or people’s stories; exploring how memory/history can be disfigured or glorified.
During her residency at HIAP Suomenlinna she will be experimenting with creating narratives, through film and photography, as hybrids of various mythologies and the memories relayed to her by people who she has met while traveling. The artist is doing this in order to create a new world mythology, stripped of the grandeur of the original myth, but bestowing a heightened reality and meaning to ordinary memory. These experiments further her interest in engaging with and subverting tropes used in storytelling, and resume her investigations into the genre of magic realism as a device to explore the effects of colonialism, nationalism, and militarised societies.