Roy Villevoye’s Art of Exchange

Since a significant part of Roy Villevoye’s oeuvre consists of photos and videos featuring Papuan villagers, it is vulnerable to the charge of neo-colonial exploitation. But although Villevoye enlists the cooperation of Papuans to produce artistic commodities that enable him to survive as an artist in the West, his art does not gloss over the economic discrepancy between him and the people he visits and depicts. On the contrary, it reflects continually on the complex interaction and interpenetration of two cultures which are also two very different economies, and on the inevitable frictions and dilemmas that accompany the production of the work. In what can be seen as part of the ‘relational’ or social turn of art in the 1990s, Villevoye moved from painting to a performative practice that foregrounded the social and economic structures from which the work emerges with rarely seen candour.