Shoufay Derz

Shoufay Derz is a an Australian artist of Taiwanese and German descent. Comprising photography, sculpture and video installation, her practice is concerned with belonging, landscape, language and the unknown. She explores the limits and possibilities of language and the ambiguities faced when attempting to visually articulate the edges of the known. Just as the writer uses words to express the ineffable, her practice engages the intersections between known and unknown worlds. 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 of history and also the uncertainties of future landscapes. The resultant, elegiac artworks are simultaneously a lament on the transience of life and a celebration of its mystery. Recently her performative experiments have played with tactics of intuition and humour to convey stories of exclusion and collectivity, while delving into the transformative possibilities, impossibilities and risks of site-specific storytelling.