Alex Kershaw uses video to mediate intercultural exchange with people and communities from a specific place. In this process, everyday people become participants and collaborators. Kershaw conceives participation as a productive entity in itself, where both subject and ‘object’ are defined through the doing of artistic praxis. Quotidian rituals used to connect and to acculturate, provide the subject matter for developing the choreography of people’s individual ‘performances’. As a result his stylistic approach shifts between: performative, cinematic, and ‘ethnographic’ genres. In his work the amalgam of fact/fiction and ‘rational’/libidinal is not a substitution of one-for-the-other, but kept in play—involving the production of a different kind of reality that could equally be a variation of realism or a new imaginary.

Alex Kershaw (born Sydney, Australia, 1977), completed a BFA in 2000 and an MFA at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales in 2010. Kershaw has exhibited extensively within Australia at venues including: The Art Gallery of NSW, Artspace, Performance Space, Heide Museum of Modern Art, The National Portrait Gallery, and The Australian Centre for Photography. In 2009 a survey of his recent video work was held at the Beaconsfield Gallery in London. In 2009 his The Phi Ta Khon Projecti, was selected for the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Germany. Most recently he participated in the show Tokyo Story, as part of the International Creator in Residence Program, at Tokyo Wondersite, Japan.