Paola Tiné

IVSA Board Member
Originally from Italy, I am an anthropologist and painter based in South Australia. Over the last years, I have conducted fieldwork in Australia and Nepal, using experimental visual methodologies, particularly drawing and painting. As an artist and researcher, my aim is to translate social interactions, constructions and paradoxes within a decoding and encoding visual language. I see the canvas as an ‘heterotopia’, using a term by Foucault, another world within this world, mirroring and yet upsetting what is outside; a space of experimentation in which the constructed mechanisms of social life are revealed.
My recent artworks focus on my doctoral research project in Nepal in which I explored family conflict, hierarchy subversion, and the making of the self among the ethnic group of the Newars. For this project, visual methodologies were an essential analytical tool to examine personal narratives of moral self-making. Building on this background, my current work examines kinship mapping and its consequences on people’s lives through participatory drawing. As a board member of IVSA, I strive to curate focused activities on the use of drawing and painting in social research and to foster collaboration with artists and less-represented groups.
Affiliation(s):
The University of Adelaide; Monash University.