In Melbourne this February, alongside the usual fair fare, artist Julie Rrap will be unveiling a new work as part of the Melbourne Art Foundation’s annual commissioning programme, which allows a leading artist to create a significant new work for donation to a public institution—this year, the Art Gallery of Western Australia (AGWA). Rrap is recognised for her contribution to feminist art and its project of unsettling the image of the body that has been carried through art history. Her work, she once stated, is a practice of “dancing in the margins and making night raids into enemy territory.”

SOMOS (Standing On My Own Shoulders), the new commission, will be a life-size sculpture made of bronze, a material Rrap has worked with extensively throughout her career. Working from casts of her own body, Rrap will capture an action scene, with one figure supporting another on their shoulders. A moment of both struggle and triumph with and over self, the work provides a counter-image to those of heroism to which bronze is usually committed, at the centre of which is an older female body—still reckoning with what it means to be embodied in this world, still dancing exultantly in the margins.