Latina visual artist and filmmaker Pilar Mata Dupont (b. 1981) has a complex and multifaceted practice spanning film, installation, performance, and photography. Her research driven delves into the fallibility and malleability of narratives of history and memory. Her Argentinean background and upbringing in Australia, Argentina, and Brunei Darussalam – all settler states or former colonies – serve as a lens through which she frames her work, and her home of eight years in the Netherlands has become a recent focus of investigation.\r\n\r\nUsing temporal strategies of looping, fragmentation, and dislocation, she re-imagines histories, memories, and texts, creating alternative readings that question the construction of dominant narratives that shape Western society. Drawing from her background working as an actor and singer she uses a playful lexicon of theatre and cinema in her work as a bridge to varied audiences.











Scenes from the Polder Western
Duo exhibition with Erika Roux. https://www.radius-cca.org/en/exhibitions/pilar-mata-dupont-erika-roux-scenes-from-the-polder-western
Forest of Being Time
Based on the TFAM collection of Time-Based Media, Forest of being Time attempts
to explore the “liminal/marginal moments” in contemporary art and to locate the
space-time of passage “between” here and there.
Mondriaan Residency - Pompgemaal
A residency undertaken with Erika Roux investigating water management in the Netherlands.
La Hormigas (performance)
60mins. Three unreliable narrators play members of the artist’s family, constantly changing roles, as they attempt to piece together testimonies of a past mediated through Mata Dupont’s auto-fictive screenplay, interweaving elements of family drama, and experimental, absurdist performance
With new scenes added and removed each week, it depicts a live negotiation in contested, half-remembered memories.
Las Hormigas/The Ants (exhibition)
Across Las Hormigas, Mata Dupont’s works play out the complex, constantly unfolding process of remembering, forgetting, and rewriting history. The exhibition debuts a new performance and video installation drawing from the artist’s rich archive of her family’s history, assembled over a period of almost ten years. Presented in the adjoining galleries is La Maruja (2021) – a powerful series of large-scale photographs and a single-channel video, continuing her theatrical and cinematic explorations
Residency - Buitenplaats Brienenoord
A 3 month research residency undertaken with Erika Roux.
A Table Read
A Table Read is an autofictive performance, unfolding fragmentary information collected from women in Mata Dupont’s family who lived through the last military dictatorship in Argentina.
With with Petra Ball, Ratri Notosudirdjo, and Lili Ullrich. Dramaturgy by Nicola Unger. Costume by Rico Dyks. Co-produced by WET, Rotterdam.
Into the Open
Throughout history, public spaces have been the setting for both shared catharsis and collective imagination. Into the Open is a program of moving-image artworks that will be projected along the waterfront throughout the Festival. Responding to the programs curated by Lemi Ponifasio, Laurie Anderson and Bret McKenzie, this three-week series brings into the open artistic visions of what it means to be human, together.
Island Tales - Taiwan and Australia
As opposed to history, which emphasizes realistic descriptions of the past, tales employ fictional language to interpret and reinterpret stories from the past and various subjects. This process of “remémoration” forms a bridge between time and locality. The exhibition sets out from a rewriting of history, and recruit 13 artists from Taiwan and West Australia were invited to be part of this journey inspired by the idea of tales.
The National - New Australian Art
A six-year initiative over three editions in 2017, 2019 and 2021, the curatorial vision for the exhibition represents a mix of emerging, mid-career and established artists drawn from around the country and Australian artists practicing overseas.
The Ague
Set in London's Kew Gardens and adapted from Virginia Woolf's short story on the site, Pilar Mata Dupont's solo exhibition, 'The Ague' is a hallucinatory wandering through the world's largest and most diverse collection of living plants. Upending scientific and historical narratives and conflating truth and misinformation, the Australian artist's newest work explores the underlying systemic presence of colonial legacies in contemporary culture and the environment.
Only Weeds Emerge
TENT presented the first solo exhibition of Pilar Mata Dupont in the Netherlands. In three theatrical video installations she depicted the dormant presence of colonial histories in contemporary culture and in the natural landscape. Invasive plants, dormant seeds, the red soil of Western Australia and a tap dancer played the main role.
New Histories
In New Histories contemporary artists reimagine ten historic works from the collection at Bendigo Art Gallery. Informed by technological, social, environmental, political and historical events that have occurred since the original work's creation, artists in the exhibition revisit interpretations of Australian and European histories through the lens of contemporary culture. I made 'Attending to Agnes' with Rotterdam artists, Seecum Cheung, Maike Hemmers, Isabelle Sully and Flora Woudstra.
Undesirable Bodies
Pilar Mata Dupont returns to Western Australia this February with Undesirable Bodies, a major exhibition installation exploring colonial legacies and ecological conservation. Filmed in the Pilbara region, Undesirable Bodies challenges Euro-centric notions of beauty through striking images and a three-screen video. Using invasive flora species as her primary subject, Mata Dupont explores conflicting contemporary issues at Jirndawurrunha, a sacred place for the Yindjibarndi People.
Wexner Center for the Arts - film residency
I won this residency at the 19th Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil.
Les Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin
A major event dedicated to the contemporary practices of the moving image, Rencontres Internationales offers a space to discover and reflect upon new cinema and contemporary art.
Purgatory was itself a mountain
In this solo exhibition are three recent, award-winning or nominated video works made in Australia, Germany, Switzerland. The films look at the mountain as a metaphor for alienation and inequity, and how history makes itself known in the present. Using allegorical adaptations of texts by Sigmund Freud, Dante Alighieri, and Thomas Mann, the works investigate group psychology and tyranny, the bureaucratese and politicization of asylum seeker policy, and the glorification of historical wars.
Hotel Europa
Works by NITS, the Dutch band around singer and artist Henk Hofstede, by Pilar Mata Dupont from Australia and by Janis Rafailidou are flanked by work by young makers from all over Europe. These young makers have responded to the open call and in this way Concordia offers a stage to young fresh makers in the genre in a playful way.
The Social Contract
The exhibition that will be on view at IZOLYATSIA showcases various examples of rethinking, instrumentalizing and manipulating commemorative objects that shape our perception of collective history. The featured works deal with controversial monuments within different discourses - post-Soviet (Krassimir Terziev, Arseny Zhilyaev) and post-Cold War (Kristina Benjocki, Pilar Mata Dupont) - stimulating viewers to re-evaluate their own experiences.
19th Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil
Created in 1983 by Solange Farkas, its chief curator ever since, the Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil has been consolidating itself over the years as a diversified and multifaceted platform focused on promoting, fostering, and reflecting on the artistic production of the Global South.
Brighton Museum and Art Gallery, and Royal Pavilion
Residency organized by Andrew Nicholls.
Salon Fluchthilfe - Utopian Pulse, Flares in the Darkroom
Focusing concrete sociopolitical situations, this group exhibition follows utopian projections that serve the purposes of secession from and resistance to our particular present. Utopia here is understood as an always incomplete alternative, the invocation within the given world of something incompatible with, and hostile to, given conditions.
Kaiho
'Kaiho', the solo exhibition by Australian artist Pilar Mata Dupont, is a video based triptych relating to the concept of the 'kaiho' (Finland's version of Saudade, or longing for something unobtainable). The trilogy has been created in various locations in Finland during the years 2011-2013. This is the premiere of the trilogy in Finland.
SeMA Biennale: Mediacity Seoul 2014
Mediacity Seoul is an international biennale of media art and contemporary art organized by Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA). This year's artistic director is artist / film director Park Chan-kyong, who conceived the theme of exhibition as 'Asia' with the title, 'Ghosts, Spies, and Grandmothers'. More than 452 teams of artists from 51 countries have participated in total in the past exhibitions. This year, 42 international artists (teams included) from 17 countries are presenting their works.
Campbelltown Arts Centre residency
A residency awarded to create a commissioned work, 'Purgatorio', for the group exhibition, 'The List'.
Asialink residency at the The National Art Studio
Residency awarded by Asialink.
Freud Museum residency
Residency organized by Andrew Nicholls
Wagner 2013: Künstlerpositionen
Work made as part of Hold Your Horses. Group exhibition including: Christian Boltanski / Jean Kalman, Romeo Castellucci, Friedrich Dieckmann, Jürgen Flimm, Achim Freyer, Andreas Homoki, Alexander Kluge, Peter Konwitschny, Barrie Kosky, Jonathan Meese, Hans Neuenfels, Helmut Oehring, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, Anna Viebrock , Robert Wilson.
Helsinki International Artist Programme, Australia Council Studio
Residency awarded by the Australia Council for the Arts.