Sriwhana Spong: 'HA HA HA' makes Australian debut with a focus on mist and Balinese mysticism

Mist moves through Sriwhana Spong: HA HA HA as a metaphor. This phenomenon signifies instability, unknowing as a means of knowing and refusal of cultural reductionism. Spong is often inspired by a small or contingent encounter—a text, an image, a living organism or a historical trace—which becomes the starting point for inquiry. Her practice unfolds nonlinearly, taking divergent routes as she follows these encounters through experiential, material, speculative and historical research. By engaging with multiple approaches toward a subject, she asks how knowledge is produced while making perceptible different ways of knowing. By drawing on parallel, past and unperceived currents, Spong’s work revels in a plurality that awakens our senses to other beings and languages. This is a method for living relationally instead of hermetically. Underpinning her work is an oscillation between intimacy and distance, informed by the relationship of her body to her Balinese heritage and o