BEN TUPAS

Comprised of a trilogy of video works, Mindanao Story Cycle was exhibited at Umbrella Studio Contemporary Arts, Townsville and featured the premiere of the video work Invisibility Barong (2024).

The videos act as self-portraits, individually and collectively exploring cultural identity and family history. They are layered with moving image, sound and symbolism.

In the titular work Mindanao Story Cycle, Tupas reflects on three generations of family history. Writer Ken Leslie noted that the artist presented the 2018 work objectively as a form of data visualisation to analyse and process the complex information within.

For Greetings from Eurasia, 2022, Tupas reflects more subjectively, layering experiences, sights, sounds and memories with a curious collection of everyday objects. Through this layering, he considers the roles adopted to navigate between two disparate worlds.

Finally in Invisibility Barong, Tupas works with a physical garment to interrogate the metaphysical and embodied experience of belonging.

Read: Mindanao Story Cycle Catalogue

Light projection produced for public art events and site activations.

Started as a personal postcard project in 2019, ‘Observational Correspondence’ presents a selection of postcards gathered from almost 5 years of collaboration.

In a digital world where analogue communication and the postal service are slowly fading into obsolescence Lisa Clarke and Ben Tupas use the miniature canvas of the postcard to document stories from contemporary regional Australia.

Some of the works have been completed in situ, during or immediately after observation. Other works are drawn from a written note weeks later. Some postcards present as rough sketches, others like cartoons, and many like miniature paintings or illustrations. 

Each work is a time capsule with additional marks from postage stamps, postmarks, and handwritten dates giving clues around their historical context.

Each postcard gives a glimpse of humour, pathos, and fleeting beauty inspired by the human condition and the natural world.

Read Exhibition Essay
See Post boxes of Albury and Toowoomba

“Has Joined the Room” (2022) is a video work that invites the viewer into a teleconference with nature. Made during the pandemic, the scheduled ‘conversation’ is part-reflection, part-site activation prompting viewers to consider the ways in which they negotiate their relationships and connections to others - and to the natural world.

Has Joined The Room (2022)
Medium: video
Duration: 3 minutes

Has Joined the Room was exhibited online as part of Outerspace Gallery’s SUPERCUT project.

In 'Greetings From Eurasia', I utilise techniques of video storytelling to invite the viewer to consider new understandings of travel - through a bicultural lens.

The work draws directly from a collection of post-WWII era, shell-carved figurines discovered for sale in an antique store. The carvings depict scenes from everyday life in the Asia Pacific.

By selectively employing video, audio, and light projected onto an installation of found objects, the work suggests a foreign landscape, stereotypical travel destinations, and opposing characters: the native/tourist, driver/passenger, and seller/buyer.

In addition, the work explores broader themes such as colonialism, consumerism and migration.

Greetings From Eurasia (2022)
Medium: Video, audio and found objects
Duration: 6 minutes
Size: various dimensions

First exhibited at Crows Nest Gallery, QLD Australia from June 1-26 2022

In “Isz Dah Boo Kid (Fish Mountain)” (2022), I survey the swirling ocean landscape from my place on a rustic blue boat. By digitally manipulating video in the same way as a double exposure photograph, I blur the horizon line to evoke the feeling of both simultaneously surfacing and submerging.

Awards
Lethbridge 20000 2023 Salon de Refuses

Social Fabric (2023) is a series of four street prints commmissioned as part of a street revitalisation project in Toowoomba, Queensland.

In the work, I celebrate the strong connections that enable enduring community resilience. All four street prints use the stylised, repeating image of cotton thread magnified under a microscope, cropped within a hexagonal frame.

This design element pays tribute to the many drapery stores that once traded on the original main street selling fabric, textiles and imported clothing.

A meandering stream of blue intersects each patterned print to symbolise the natural waterways that flow in and around the city centre. Through history, water–be it in flood or drought–has tested the measure and strength of Toowoomba’s social fabric.

Social Fabric (2022)
Medium: print on asphalt
Sizes:
Becker Lane
L 5400mm x W 1700mm
Newlands Lane
L 6000mm x W 1500mm
Bank Lane
L 6000mm x W 1200mm
Western Lane
L 4580mm x W 1400mm

“Mindanao Story Cycle’ is a video and collection of printed works that focus on place, specifically Mindanao in the southern Philippines, where my parents grew up.

By digitally manipulating found photographs collected as a tourist, family member and documentarian, the work acts a meditation on the whole gamut of family stories.

These intergenerational stories are steeped in memory and myth, and maybe, most importantly - self-discovery.

Mindanao Story Cycle (2018)
Medium: Video installation & digital prints
Sizes: Various dimensions

First exhibited at Toowoomba Regional Art Gallery.

Read: Exhibition Essay