Relations of Return: Brodie Kokkinos

Brodie Kokkinos is a conceptual artist whose practice spans across video, photography, sculpture, installation and performance. Motivated by the haunting power of visual culture Kokkinos explores ways to visually reimagine the slippery seductive power of such popular imagery in alternative timelines and circumstances. Kokkinos graduated from VCA in 2020 with (First Class) Honours, and was the recipient of the Lionel Gell Foundation Award. Kokkinos has since completed a residency with the Centre of Projection Art. In 2022 Kokkinos founded an artist-run initiative MILK Gallery situated on Wurundjeri woi-wurrung country. 

The concept of haunting is a rich and variegated space in the making and thinking of Brodie Kokkinos artistic practice. If haunting occurs in the spaces between presence and absence, Brodie’s specific use of installation, performance, and photographic methods, articulates that threshold. Haunting is understood as both concept and method.

The forces, persuasions, and seductions of commercial visual languages are taken as material for Brodie’s photographic, video and installation works, strategically restaged and redistributed. Strategies such as digital animation, durational art film, and video installation are used to amplify and transform the culturally charged imagery from multiple in-ways.

Brodie’s practice deals poetically with the undercurrents of imagery and their psychosensorial push and pull upon the embodied spectator. Works act as conjugates for the malevolent forces within image-making systems like advertising, film, cinema and even contemporary art. Brodie’s elaborate reconfigurations act to intervene in their spectral powers, redirecting them as they are in play.