Spirit & Muscle 2012 Philippines

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BACKGROUND Prior to being included in Susan Gibb's 2012 curated exhibition of Australian and New Zealand Video Art at the University of the Philippines Film Institute, Spirit & Muscle was first exhibited at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in 2006 and subsequently in 2010 as part of the curated exhibition COLOURlightTIME, Two Rooms Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand. Susan Gibb's exhibition explored the performing body as a site of universal signification and the 'inter-medium' possibilities of video art. CONTRIBUTION Kosloff's Spirit & Muscle is a performative video that uses physical gestures and abstract costumes to reference the phallocentric male cannon in art history, as well as cultural ideals. She demonstrates the abstract possibilities of the performing body in this work by alluding to a range of cultural interests, including sport, modern abstraction, dance and cartoons. Spirit & Muscle conflates 'high' and 'low' references and uses the performing body to explore signification processes within video art. SIGNIFICANCE The significance of this research is that it explored how simple gestures and choreography can be used to structure meaning processes within the video medium. Select works from Australia and New Zealand were exhibited at the University of the Philippines Film Institute, an organisation that is at the forefront of Filipino film education, practice, and scholarship. The University of the Philippines itself has a strong association with the history of conceptual art and this exhibition provided an opportunity for transnational reflection on the legacies of modernism and conceptualism, and how contemporary artists interpret these in their own social and artistic climate. The exhibition was an AsiaLink program supported by the Australia Council for the Arts and Arts NSW. Works such as this led to Kosloff being invited to be the Monash University Prato Centre Visual Resident for 2015.