Henri Matisse’s costume provided direct inspiration for Sriwhana Spong’s stunning moving-image work Costume for a mourner 2010. Spong brings Matisse’s oversized felt outfit, which reminded Spong of a ceremonial robe, to life through an imagining of the lost choreography of the Ballets Russes’s Le chant du rossignol (Song of the Nightingale) in 1920. With no known footage of the original performance in existence, and curious to see how the body might move within Matisse’s voluminous costume, Spong worked with dancer Benny Ord to create a dance drawn from the remaining artefacts. This included the score by Stravinsky, the garment designed by Matisse, and photographs of the dancers, along with rumours, myths and anecdotes about the ballet. Ideas of distance, translation, the archive, and the fragmentation of knowledge inform much of Spong’s practice, including reflections on her Balinese heritage, from which she felt distanced during her upbringing in New Zealand. In Costume for a mourner, Spong meditates on her personal experience of piecing together her background to reflect on exoticism in the European avant-garde.