DOMESTICUS VENUS

Film and Sculpture Work by Victoria Pham (2022)

9’20’’ minutes, Single Channel video with 2-channel sound

5 clay “Venus” figurines installed with faux museum plaques

August 11 - September 3. 2022.

Commissioned by KINGS Gallery as part of the STRAY VOLTAGE project.

Support by Creative Victoria,

How do we reconstruct the past? Throughout the late 19th century and 20th century, Upper Paleolithic stautes depicting women began to be uncovered. These have been labelled as Venus Figurines with the Venus of Willendorf, dated from 25 000 BP (before present) coming to symbolise art, iconography and ritual behaviour of pre-Neolithic cultures. These figurines have extensively been research but are too often assigned the function of ritual object and being depictions of fertility mother goddess. In the words of Dr Alison Betts, if the world were to be destroyed today and all that remained were Barbie Dolls, would we then assign those objects the same function as a Paleolithic Venus Figurine?

Domesticus Venus seeks to interrogate these reductive modes of research. By playfully tracking the creation of similar statues from this period into their discovery in the late 1890s and thus proclamation of an object that was intended as a mere toy into the religious symbol of a society labelled as ancient and primitive, this video work challenges modes of academic knowledge-making. This project asks us to consider the question; despite “objectivity” of scientific methods, do we ultimately superimpose our subjective perception of past behaviours and past cultures?

- Words by Victoria Pham

CREDITS

Narration by Robert Attenborough and Victoria Pham

Voices Recorded by

Aman Kang as Australian academic

Edwin de Jaegar as South African academic, in Afrikaans

Daniel Pini as German academic, in German

James Clark as British academic

Natalia Z. as American academic

Victoria Pham as French academic, in French

Camera and Filming

Daniel Pini