My name is Atong Atem and I am a visual artist based in Melbourne. I work mostly with photography and video and tend to focus on portraiture.
The particular work that's here at the National Portrait Gallery, I'm wearing a lime green suit with a hat that's hiding my face a little bit and I'm sitting with a wide-legged stance, hands between my legs, staring quite sternly towards the camera. The series was really about me exploring presentation, especially when it comes to traditional photography on the African continent, that studio photography history, and how for so many people having the opportunity to be photographed was often a point of celebration or a significant moment, which meant that the way that people dressed and presented themselves to be photographed was quite formal, and if not formal, it was at least a moment to like truly express yourself and to present yourself in a way that is important. It was definitely intentional to make this particular work at that point in my life. And by that point I mean like post becoming a mother and having this new social identity and also in many ways having a new physical identity in the world and in the way that that body is interpreted, that body is sort of dictated.
I've done a lot of photographs that look at that feminine performance of properness or perfection or costume, and this was an opportunity to do a masculine investigation. So I was looking at my uncles, my siblings, my dad and other male figures, as well as men who are in parliament, in government, and looking at the way that they've reinterpreted colonial Western standards of proper presentation for men and masculinity.
