Pilar Mata Dupont works mainly with photography and video following her previous collaborative
practice with Tarryn Gill, begun in 2001, which encompassed photography, performance,
choreography, film, installation, theatre and design. After two years of research into the history and
politics between North and South Korea, visiting North Korea, and undertaking an Asialink Residency at the Goyang National Art Studio in Seoul, Mata Dupont focused on two reunification monuments in North and South Korea. She has animated those monuments to play with utopian ideas of reunification, and the significance of ‘the embrace’ as representation of the reunification in the South Korian national psyche. The two figures from the ‘Three Charters for National Reunification’ monument near Pyongyang lovingly embrace, only to have their joy dissipate and a new uncomfortable state of realisation to emerge. The work references DPRK propaganda, K-pop, texts by Andrei Lankov and Lee Eung-joon, and the romantic notions of reunification used by artists, filmmakers, and writers in South Korea during the 1990s and early 21* century; the ‘Sunshine Policy’ era of soft-line attitude to the North. Mata Dupont9s collaborative practice with Tarryn Gill focused on developing visual art projects that explored the choreographed language of scenarios that intentionally employ aesthetic artifice. This new work, while a solo project, completes this arc of lush visual imagery centred on female tropes, evident in the collaboration’s earlier photographic work, Bride of the North (2009).

Mata Dupont completed a Bachelor of Arts (Art) at Curtin University of Technology in 2001. She has exhibited work at Centre Pompidou, Paris: Akademie der Kiinste, Berlin: Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; and Art Basel, Miami. In 2010 she won the Basil Sellers Art Prize with Tarryn Gill for the black and white filmic work Gymnasium (2010) already in the Collection. Mata Dupont has recently been working outside her long-standing collaboration with Tarryn Gill and focusing on international residencies to research her filmic practice. Similar to this video from her residency in Korea, her work Kaiho, 2012 draws on her time in Finland and reflects Finnish dance, lyrics and fiction and points to her clear intent to absorb and reflect these international references in her work.