Laresa Kosloff
(b. 1974, Melbourne. Lives and works in Melbourne)

Laresa Kosloff works across video, audio, Super 8 film, photography and performance. Her practice is concerned with representational strategies, each linked by an interest in the human body and notions of agency in everyday life.

Three of Kosloff’s video works are included in Melbourne Now, each assembled and edited entirely from corporate video stock footage sourced on the internet. In La Perruque, 2019, a businessman pens a novel during work hours, imagining his co-workers as characters in a fantastical narrative. In Radical Acts, 2020, a group of climate scientists clandestinely distribute a pathogen that renders corporate workers less productive and more accepting of motivations beyond profit. This work concludes with a song sung by climate activist Violet Coco, who was recently sentenced to fifteen months in prison for an act of non-violent civil disobedience with the climate action group Fireproof Australia. In New Futures, 2021, a biohacking initiative wages war between the industrious and hyper-charismatic ‘synthetic’ personalities and disgruntled hackers, nostalgic for an apathetic past. Darkly humorous, incisive and exploring themes of duplicity, neoliberalism and the climate crisis, the videos are connected by a questioning of representation in the public realm. In an act of what the artist refers to as ‘political ventriloquism’, each work is steered by stylised narration and overdubbing that imbues new – and at times unsettling – meaning into the found footage.

Represented by Sutton Gallery in Melbourne, Kosloff has held a number of solo exhibitions, including at Spring 1883, Monash University Museum of Art, Margaret Lawrence Gallery, Artspace, and Melbourne City Square. She has also exhibited in group settings at Buxton Museum, Art Gallery of NSW, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Art Gallery of Ballarat, the Melbourne Prize for Urban Sculpture and the 67th Blake Prize. In 2021, she was awarded the Incinerator Art for Social Change Award. Kosloff was the recipient of the Guirguis New Art Prize in 2019.