Arini Byng makes body-based work. Born on Gadigal land, she is a First Nations multidisciplinary artist of Lenape, African American and Anglo-Celtic descent. Trained as a photographer, Byng’s work comprises video, photography, performance, sound, sculpture and installation.
Byng works with the affective qualities of materials, gestures and settings; undertaking exercises in image, movement and form to negotiate political scenes. Byng’s videos and performances are complex, intimate studies in gesture and action. Her practice endeavours to illustrate a haptic or tactile phenomenology of the body as it encounters the physical world. In her work to date, Byng has used the body in motion as a means of unpacking familial ties and histories; physical intimacy between friends; the interrelation of performance and the screen; the potential generated by structural collapse and our means of experiencing and holding space in the world. In Byng’s performances, the camera is not a distinct entity, but an active and integral participant. Byng’s practice also operates through collaboration with other practitioners such as contemporary dancers, musicians and visual artists.
Her work has been exhibited nationally including Blak Dot Gallery, Watch This Space, Neon Parc Project Space, MPavilion, c3 Contemporary Art Space, Blindside, Bus Projects, Margaret Lawrence Gallery, The Australian Centre For Contemporary Art, and The Centre for Contemporary Photography. Selected works have been published by Perimeter Editions, Higher Arc, Le Roy and Photofile; with work held in the publication collections of V&A, MoMA, MOCA and Tate Modern. Arini lives and works in Naarm (Melbourne) on the unceded sovereign lands and waterways of the Boon Wurrung and Woi Wurrung (Wurundjeri) people of the Kulin Nation.