Françoise Schneiders on F*ck you, I’m not your Dusky Maiden

Content Advice

Please be advised that this talk discusses adult themes and includes some coarse language.

Artist Françoise Schneiders provides a talk focused on her work, F*ck you, I’m not your Dusky Maiden on display as part of the SaVĀge K’lub.

A direct response to Gauguin’s depictions of Pasifika people, in this series of photographs, Schneiders challenges the tropes of Tahitian women as ‘dusky maidens’ who are both ‘sexy and submissive’ and ‘exotic and naïve.’ F*ck you, I’m not your Dusky Maiden highlights the real harms this has caused Tahitian women for generations.

Françoise Schneiders is a Tahitian lens-based artist whose practice is deeply intertwined with her identity as the daughter and mother of Tahitian women. She creates works of disarming aesthetic quality that subvert the language of oppression to disrupt the hegemonic gaze. Describing her art practice as “way-finding”, she navigates alternate ways of seeing and being seen. Her work explores questions of Pasifika identity, representation, and the beauty in the everyday, utilising three decades of creative work across performative self-portraiture, expanded documentary, still life, family archives, text, and personal audio recordings.

Inspired by activists and artists from bell hooks and Haunani Kay-Trask to Masao Yamamoto and Francesca Woodman, her work is both critical and poetic. Eschewing technocratic photographic styles that attempt to trap moments in time, her aesthetic communicates a blurred temporality symbolic of the Vā, the space between. In this liminal and relational space, for Schneiders, lies the creative potential for connection and transformation.

Art Talks are a free weekly program. Hear from artists, curators and experts on the works in our collection and exhibition program. This Art Talk is part of a series focused on activating the SaVĀge K’lub.