A Body that Lives

Fiona Amundsen is an artist whose practice explores how documentary photographic and filmic images can enable a connected, active and caring relationship to the ramifications of painful historical experiences that live on in the present.  She is interested in establishing relationships between specific historical events, the social responsibility of witnessing, and the ethics of documentary photographic and filmic practices. 

 

Amundsen edits declassified military produced archival imagery with her own present-day photography and filming to investigate the potential for imagery to perform a kind of visual listening and documentary witnessing of acts of colonial imperial violence, be it historical or not.  Her images enable an ethical caring based in relationships of imagining over reified visibility, and listening over cognitive knowing. She has exhibited widely throughout the Asia Pacific region, United States and Europe, and her writing has appeared in a selection of scholarly journals.

Fiona Amundsen & Tim Corballis, Human Hand (install view) at The Dowse Art Museum, Wellington, 2020. (Photo by Shaun Matthews)

Fiona Amundsen & Tim Corballis, Human Hand (install view) at The Dowse Art Museum, Wellington, 2020. (Photo by Shaun Matthews)

Her PhD (Monash University, 2019) developed methods that employed a camera to see and hear the presence of Asia Pacific War histories in modalities other than government sanctioned public memorials and museums. She was awarded the Mollie Holman Award for “best doctoral thesis”, which is “among the highest academic honours the University bestows, and marks the recipients as researchers of the highest order.” 

Her PhD examination exhibition — A Body that Lives (2018) — was nominated for the 2021 Walters Prize, Aotearoa’s most significant contemporary art award. Her PhD research continues to have impact; she was selected to develop new artworks for the 2020/2021 Tokyo Biennale and to contribute to the joint Mori Museum (Tokyo)/Tate Modern (London) research project From Alexandria to Tokyo: Art, Colonialism and Entangled Histories which focuses on non-western imperialism, and to participate in the exhibition Things that Shape Us (2021) at Christchurch Art Gallery.

Fiona Amundsen & Hiroshi Nakatsuji with Haruyo Nihei, Our Remaining Breath, installed as part of the Tokyo Biennale at Miraiteiban Kenkyu-Jyo, Tokyo, 2021.

In 2019 she was awarded a Fulbright New Zealand Scholar Award which enabled her to begin the initial research for Coming back to Life (2019 – ), a visual arts project that explores relationships between military nuclear technologies, military-capitalism, nuclear environmental destruction and spirituality. In 2020 she exhibited Human Hand at the Dowse Art Museum (Wellington), which is  the first iteration of this project. Human Hand was developed in collaboration with Dr Tim Corballis (Centre for Science and Society, Victoria University). In 2022 she will continue this project by exhibiting There is a Bear in the Woods at the Wende Museum of Cold War (Los Angeles).

Fiona is also working on the collaborative project A Second Sun: The Legacies of Nuclear Imperialisms across Oceania with Dr Sylvia Frain. Their  MBIE Science Whitinga Fellowship funded project explores Moana-Oceanic livelihoods and environments that remain heavily impacted from fifty years of weapons testing and ongoing militarisation.

Their project begins with a settlers’ responsibility methodology and seeks to establish a socio-ethical image of contemporary nuclear imperialisms that is reflective of the long-lasting realities of nuclear weapons testing.  Their research explores how experimental creative documentary methods and socio-ethical listening and witnessing can make visible that which is invisible, meaning radiation and imperial ideologies while contributing to nuclear justice.

Fiona Amundsen & Kanariya Eishi, ‘An Ordinary Life’, installed as part of Thing that Shape Us, Christchurch Art Gallery, Christchurch, 2021.

Fiona Amundsen with Fuyuko Akiyoshi, Kayoko Ebina, Ben Kuroki, Nobuyoshi Maehira, Asumi Mizuo, Teruo Murakami, Michiko Uehara and Mami Yamada, A Body that Lives, installed as part of the 2021 Walter’s Prize, Auckland Art Gallery, Aucakland, 2021. (Photo Jennifer French)

Fiona Amundsen with Fuyuko Akiyoshi, Kayoko Ebina, Ben Kuroki, Nobuyoshi Maehira, Asumi Mizuo, Teruo Murakami, Michiko Uehara and Mami Yamada, A Body that Lives, installed as part of the 2021 Walter’s Prize, Auckland Art Gallery, Aucakland, 2021. (Photo Jennifer French)

Centre for Design Research
Te Kura Toi a Hoahoa
School of Art and Design

Te Wānanga Aronui o Tāmaki Makau Rau,
Auckland University of Technology

Contact:

Susan Hedges susan.hedges@aut.ac.nz
Mandy Smith mandy.smith@aut.ac.nz

Authors are responsible for obtaining permission to publish images or illustrations with their papers in CDR; neither editors nor publishers of CDR accept responsibility for any author’s/authors’ failure to do so.

© Centre for Design Research, AUT University 2021