Andrew Hazewinkel engages with archaeological material as a means to shed light on the contemporary legacies of ancient stories, objects, and archetypes. His practice draws out relationships between the body, the materiality of objects, and the very human act of remembering. He combines traditional forms of scholarship with a strong poetic sensibility, which manifests as a broad material range that includes photographs, objects, video installations, and books. Currently a Creative Research Fellow at the Australian Archaeological Institute at Athens, recent works include the documentation of six corroded 1st c. BCE marble statues, which were retrieved in 1901 from a shipwreck off the coast of the Greek Island of Antikythera. Lying undisturbed on the seabed for 2000 years, the surfaces of these Classical bodies have become dramatically excoriated by long exposure to the sea salts, stone eating organisms and other marine encrustations. The artist’s intimate black and white portraits create a moving tension—between these badly broken figures of antiquity and that of our own soft ephemeral bodies. Another photographic series takes the viewer to the summit of a marble monolith that stands 450 metres above sea level, providing the viewer with a hazy revelation that is the slowly changing atmospheric conditions of dawn above the sea. The everydayness of this view reminds us of the contemporaneity of the remote past, thus getting at the heart of Hazewinkel’s practice—the connections between our lives and those lived long ago.
Andrew Hazewinkel (b. 1965, Melbourne, Australia) lives and works in Athens and Melbourne. His work has been presented at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the National Gallery of Victoria, The Centre for Contemporary Photography Melbourne, The Ian Potter Museum of Art at Melbourne University, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, and The British School at Rome. He has a history of active involvement in Australian artist-run initiatives, including presentations at Firstdraft Sydney and Westspace Melbourne, among others. In 2015 he was the sole Australian representative at the 31st Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Art, following which he presented details of that project at the Boghossian Foundation Villa Emapin Brussels under the artistic direction of Asad Raza. Upcoming projects include collaborations with the Danish Institute at Athens. His work is represented in national, institutional and private collections within Australia and further afield.