The Red Carpet is a documentation photograph of an architectural intervention and performance work, transposing a Ukrainian Bessarabian rug onto the steps of the Sydney Opera House.
In the work, the architectural intervention becomes a metaphorical red carpet for the Sydney Opera House – acknowledging the history and labour of women’s domestic arts as the foundation leading to starchitecture.
We foremost acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, as the Traditional Owners of the land and waters on which the following work was made – and the great pain and violence that this site holds. The following site, Tubowgule – ‘meeting of the knowledge waters’, is the tidal island where Gadigal and Eora basin communities have met, since time immemorial to dance, sing, feast, exchange knowledge and stories. Sovereignty was never ceded.
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Within its ornamental design, The Red Carpet contains a data-map of the damaged topography of Kyiv’s Maidan square protests, surveyed by the artist. The fatal pro-democracy uprising marked the beginning of Ukraine’s illegal invasion, occupation and ongoing genocide.
In combining data & textiles, The Red Carpet references a wider canon of women recording their experiences of conflict through the art mediums which were most commonly available to them across history & place: needle, loom and thread.
Shot overnight earlier in the year, the artwork mixes track-mapping on-site, as well as set-building & post-production – the work also documents the bushfire haze from Australia’s tragic summer.
Given architect Jørn Utzon’s highly public, embittered relationship with the Sydney Opera House – The Red Carpet speaks in dialogue to his enthusiasm that the building be used by artists as a town square – a Maidan – of its own, and specifically as a site of protest for humanitarian justice.
Town-square to town-square, the work stands in solidarity between the artist’s two homes.
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Installation View, Heide MoMA.
Stanislava Pinchuk : TERRA DATA (Career Survey).