This November, Artereal Gallery is proud to present Vol. III from Shoufay Derz’s ongoing series of works titled Ritual of Eels, loving the alien. Started in 2019-20, in response to an invitation from Manly Museum and Art Gallery to create new work for their Manly Dam Project exhibition, this body of work has now become a major focus within the artist’s current practice. Video and photographic works from this ongoing series have been exhibited at Manly Museum and Art Gallery and the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. The series was realised in the public exhibition Radical Imagination at King’s Cross in London as part of the Outside Art Project series, curated by the esteemed The Photographers’ Gallery, London. Works from Ritual of Eels are also concurrently showing in Sydney as part of a group exhibition curated by Luise Guest titled Home and Away at 16albermarle Project Space.

Ritual of Eels: Loving the Alien, is an ongoing relational performance inviting friends, family, acquaintances, and strangers to take part in Shoufay Derz’s “eel ritual” amid diverse parks, gardens and uncultivated greenery. The first of its kind took place at Gulgadya Muru, the grass tree trail at Manly Dam Reserve in Sydney in 2019. From the sacred waterways of the Gayamaygal people to the parks of Berlin in Germany and the lava beds of Lanzarote in Spain, these aliens/eels are drawn towards verdant realms and watery depths time and time again.

For the artist, the figure of the alien, conjured in the work’s title and her sitters’ green faces, stands as a metaphor for transformation and our shared unknowns. In chromakey imaging, green is the colour conventionally erased, with the background replaced by a new fictive landscape. Developed for its properties as a colour that is not represented in human skin, subjects are effortlessly recomposited. In this project the people themselves are green. The potentials of disappearance and transformation are shared, mirrored between the landscape and green faces. The eel too, is an elusive creature of metamorphosis, a shape-shifter linked to enigmatic stories of vast migration, that still to this day, their precise origins are unknown. Engendering a conversation about belonging and alienation this work is offered as a ritual for gathering, communal imagining and presence among people who may otherwise have nothing in common.

Shoufay Derz is an Australian-born artist of Taiwanese and German descent. She explores the limits and possibilities of language and the ambiguities faced when attempting to visually articulate the edges of the known world(s). Engaging in a conversation about belonging, alienation and relationships, she proposes rituals for the world(s) end so that we might imagine other possibilities together. Her recent work plays with improvisational tactics and humour to convey stories of exclusion and connection as she explores the transformative possibilities, impossibilities and risks of site-specific storytelling. Her interdisciplinary practice includes moving images, textiles, sculpture, photography, performance and text. Deeply engaged with poetic potentiality her projects attempt to connect the silences in language with holes in social, structural and geological landscapes to contemplate the voids and wounds of time and also the uncertainties of future landscapes.

Derz’s practice is committed to the artistic principles of collaboration, relational approaches and diversity.  She has extensive experience of public commissions, including large-scale and comprehensive work for London’s King’s Cross, The Outside Art Project (2022), St George Hospital (2018), Hornsby Hospital (2020) and the Prince of Wales Hospital (2023). Derz has had the honour of working on the development of several shared projects and initiatives, including the official Australian Pavilion for the XXII Triennale di Milano “Broken Nature: Design Takes on Human Survival” with Grandeza an Bajeza, commissioned by UTS. The pavilion received the highest honour of the 2019 Golden Bee Award.

Derz work has been exhibited extensively including the Pingyao International Festival; The Auckland Festival of Photography;  Dark Heart, Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art. From 2019 – 2020 she was a resident at Künstlerhaus Bethanien and in 2017, she held a visiting artist position at The New school – Parsons, NYC. Solo exhibitions include not this, not that, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2020); Face of the Deep, GAG PROJECTS, Australia (2019); In Memory of Water, Manly Art Gallery and Museum, Australia (2018), and The Wish, Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, Australia (2016). She has received numerous awards, including the 52nd Blake Prize for Religious Art early in her career.  She received her PhD in June 2023 for her practice-based research, Towards the Unknown: The Visual Poetics of the Ineffable.

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