Ruiqi Qiu
Liuying 2023
Liuying’s underexposed portrait with handcrafted translation 2023
from the series Variation
pigment ink-jet prints
43.0 x 28.6 cm (each)
courtesy of the artist

Untold Stories is a collaboration between the Monash Public Library Service and the Museum of Australian Photography.

Funded by a Libraries for Health and Wellbeing Innovation Grant, this program involves artists who draw on stories of the LGBTIQA+community to create a record of the pandemic from their point of view.

Work by three artists are on exhibition in the Atrium Gallery and Untold Stories will be accompanied by a publication that celebrates their practice. This includes Ruiqi Qiu's commissioned body of work entitled Variation, Laura Pettenuzzo's text based response 'On Buffy, Food and Fighting' and Al Eli Baxter's photographic series The Move.

Ruiqi Qiu: Variation

In 2023 MAPh, in collaboration with Monash Public Libraries, commissioned Ruiqi Qiu to create a photographic series that investigates the impact of COVID on the LGBTQIA+ community. The commission builds upon the connections that have been established through various projects at MAPh over the last three years. This includes revisiting participants from Being ourselves and reconnecting with artists from Being a voice, a project produced during COVID.

The resulting body of work Variations is included in a publication documenting the photographic response. Integral to the commission has been the mentoring relationship established with leading lens based artist David Rosetzky who has supported the development of the work.

MAPh has had a sustained relationship with the artist Qiu. She was a participant in David Rosetzky’s commissioned series Being ourselves which was part of Portrait of Monash: the ties that bind exhibition held at the gallery in 2020. In this series Rosetzky responded to the experience of members of the LGBTQIA+ community who live, work or study within the City of Monash. The series comprised a two channel video installation and six double exposure photographs that represented the diversity of the subjects’ experiences in an honest and open conversation.

Subsequently, Qiu was shortlisted twice in the William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize and has featured in public programs including ‘Ask the artist’ (2022), which was a collaboration with headspace, a National Youth Mental Health Foundation that provides early intervention mental health.

Curator | Anouska Phizacklea, MAPh Director

Variation is a mixed-media work. It investigates pre-pandemic, pandemic and post-pandemic experiences of the LGBTQIA+ community in the City of Monash through a series of photographic portraits, text versions of sound and a group of underexposed portraits with handcrafted translations. The multiple layers within the series Variation symbolises the existence of both invariability and variability in a person simultaneously.

The series comprises eight ‘traditional’ photographic portraits that represent participants’ pre-pandemic lives. The location was chosen by the subjects to reflects where they had often spent time within before the pandemic. Similarly, the subjects selected clothing typical of the style they wore before the pandemic. These portraits seek to evoke a sense of their daily lives – a typical and ordinary day in their lives. These photographs are constructed scenes that a founded in memory – reconstructing what their daily life was like prior to the pandemic.

Each participant was asked to record a sound that was representative of their experience of COVID. This sound was then converted to text. The texts proffer an abstraction of the participants experience during the pandemic in Melbourne. An inherent gap exists between the original sound and the descriptive text. It has a different form, shape and texture that presents differently from listening to the initial sound. It sits at a nexus between the two that distances the creator of the sound and its representation as text. The distance symbolises the sense of isolation and the challenges people faced during the pandemic. At the same time, this difference or gap speaks more broadly to the discrepancy between a person’s sense of one’s self to others’ understanding of them.

The seven portraits are accompanied by a pro-filmic set of photographs, each underexposed to create a black surface. These photographs were etched into using carving tools to reveal the white of the paper beneath the image. These carvings echoed objects depicted within the original photographs and become the only recognisable trace of the original.

Ruiqi Qiu, artist statement

A mentor’s reflection:

In 2019, I collaborated with members of the LGBTQIA+ community in the City of Monash on a photography and video project called ‘Being Ourselves.’ This initiative aimed to foreground the LGBTQIA+ community by providing a framework for their representation to be seen and their voices to be heard. I actively sought out individuals who were willing to share their stories and to be seen within their local community, as well as with audiences of the Museum of Australian Photography (previously known as Monash Gallery of Art).

Together, we created a two-channel video installation and a series of black and white double-exposure analogue photographs that explored themes of gender, identity, and community. One of the subjects of the ‘Being Ourselves’ video and photographic work was Ruiqi Qiu.

Now, three years later, I have had the great opportunity to work with Ruiqi once again, this time as a mentor, and it has been inspiring to see how she has brought her unique perspective and methodology to engage with the LGBTQIA+ community in Monash.

Ruiqi’s interest in the relationship between reality and its photographic representation, as well as her exploration of different forms of language, inspired her project Untold Stories: Variation. Through this project, Ruiqi continued the dialogue with the LGBTQIA+ community in Monash, with a particular focus on how the pandemic had affected its members. Ruiqi took a three-part approach to push the limits of photographic representation, critiquing and questioning the ability of images and text to convey the complexities of human identity, experience, and feeling. Her project is reminiscent of Martha Rosler’s seminal work, ‘The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems' (1974-75). However, Ruiqi's project also incorporated sound and extended conventional photographic representation through abstraction and her unique style of carving into the surface of the photographic prints themselves. By fusing her own visceral imprint into the creation of her series, Ruiqi asks her audience to consider the experience of the group she is representing while also seeking to critique and extend the limits of the medium of photography itself.

Dr. David Rosetzky | Artist, mentor and MAPh Committee of Management member

Al Eli Baxter: The Move

Exhibition artworks