In Souvenir (all works 2006), her latest video, Stuart Hawkins unfolds a story of the hunt for the perfect Nepalese “native” and gives a winsome performance as a geeky tourist–cum–amateur ethnographer. The artist, who is based in Nepal and New York, searches Kathmandu for this quasi-mythological being and, once she finds him, tries to reveal his pure “ethnic essence.” A series of comic blunders gives way to growing disillusion and brings to the fore prefabricated notions of “first” and “third” worlds and “culture as commodity.” An off-color sense of role play and objectification creeps into this lighthearted video as the heroine’s thoughts and desires are laid out by a male narrator, while she in turn pounces on a male specimen and tries to make him conform to her own set of cultural and ethnic fantasies.
The photographs in the exhibition, installed in an adjacent room, seem like afterthoughts, though they have an eccentric charm that stems in part from how Hawkins tampers with her own compositions. Pieces like Handiwipe and Day Driver offer hybrid style that equally channels sloppy tourist snapshots and more carefully crafted images.
