• Julie Rrap, BUST(ED), 2008, silicon rubber and black granite.
  Courtesy the artist; Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney; and Arc One Gallery, Melbourne.
  Installation view at the 16th Biennale of Sydney 2008 at the Museum of Contemporary.
  Photograph:Ben Symons.
  

Since the mid-1970s, Julie Rrap has worked with photography, painting, sculpture, performance and video in an ongoing project concerned with representations of the body. Often using her own body as the subject, many of Rrap’s works explore traditional representations of the female nude in art history and popular culture. Her sculpture for the Sydney Biennale is a subversion of western artistic traditions and the gender politics they reflect. Traditionally the sculptural bust was dedicated to men of importance and heroic stature, while the female nude celebrated the erotic other. BUST(ED) (2008) exposes and inverts these relationship: an upside-down silicon nude squats atop a black granite cube reminiscent of Manzoni’s Socle du Monde (1961) in which the world becomes inverted on a plinth. (See an image of the Manzoni work at Artspace.) BUST(ED) is a ‘head stone’ that inverts death by exposing the fleshy underside of life.

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