From André Brasil, Chistine Mello, Eduardo de Jesus, Ronaldo Entler and Solange Oliveira Farkas. 'Southern Panoramas' in Performance:15th Festival Internacianal de Arte Eletronica Videobrasil, Catalogue, São Paulo, Brasil, 2006, in which John Gillies' Divide was exhibited:
"Historically, electronic art has always shown itself to be resistant to stable narratives characterized by a linear syntax. For various reasons the historical progression of video art has always highlighted works structured in more open, associative and fragmentary narratives. This tendency seems to stem from a set of legacies from historical vanguard and experimental cinemas that have gathered round video in a way that broadens the path opened up by the pioneers. In this sense, the most typical narratives in video art are seen as experimental and polysemous spaces."
I love this depiction of "a set of legacies from historical vanguard and experimental cinemas that have gathered round video". But also, the proposition of moving on from that:
"... the chameleonic nature of electronic art and the restlessness of its artists take the production down other tacks. Works are emerging that, while not relinquishing their formal experimentalism, nonetheless make forays into what at first glance appears to be the realm of more conventional narratives. As always, these processes of assimilation and fusion are not calm transitions, but powerful ruptures that end up weakening certain aspects as they strengthen others. In this process, images and sounds are combined in unusual narratives that no longer limit themselves to the typical discontinuity of video, nor adhere to the stable structures associated with classical cinema. What emerges from this are narratives that flirt with linearity, but provoke small, intense displacements, creating an ambiguous space between audiovisual traditions and its far from naïve appropriation by the artists."
Thursday, March 20, 2008
What you may want to know about Whitefellanormal
All curators do the work of moving local meaning in to international frameworks of reception with the aim of ensuring the work's continued happening in public. (Which is not to say that they help the process any, necessarily, or construct appropriate publics, just that the positive guarding or invigoration of 'the happening', in different ways, is most commonly the responsibility the profession is charged with). To work with Indigenous new media art just makes this process a little more transparent. The serious conceptual play of Vernon Ah Kee’s work in photography, text, drawing and more recently video is interesting in that the core of the work’s conceptualism is misinterpretation--characteristic and longstanding--of indigenous experience--including misinterpretation created by benevolent efforts at making indigenous experience public through various language and media practices.
In the video Whitefellanormal, Ah Kee interrogates the exposure of his Palm Island ancestors to the damaging formalism of colonial photography: the problems of representation that connect portraits to maps. I have written about Whitefellanormal previously as part of my work with the Pacific Rim New Media Summit 2006. What I guess is important to note when viewing in the context of this curated program are the work’s links to Vernon’s work in other media, particularly the 2004 exhbiition, Fantasies of the Good, in which Ah Kee created intricate portraits in pencil from photographs of his relatives taken on Palm Island in North Queensland.
Palm Island was, essentially, a penal colony for Pacific Islanders and Indigenous people from various tribes all over Queensland who resisted being compulsorily moved on to ‘reserves’. Anthropologist Norman Tindale travelled to Palm Island in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1960s as part of his project to map the boundaries of Australian indigenous tribal lands and language groups. The map which resulted from this was the first to present a continent-wide cartographic representation of Indigenous nations and language groups to a white Australian public. In their contentious allocation of fixed territories to diverse tribal groups, the maps presented key evidence in countering the doctrine of terra nullius.
The convincing formal argument that the drawings in Fantasies of the Good made, is that the photographs in Tindale’s archive betray a clinical distance in the gaze through which this project of turning grounded histories into mapped data is achieved. Ah Kee’s relatives (Mick Miller and George Sibley), dressed smartly for their picture, held just a catalogue card with only a number on it to represent and distinguish themselves from every other numbered Indigenous identity. Subsequent copies of these troubling images were ‘formally’ censored by the government of Queensland in so far as they were heavily cropped: only the heads and shoulders of his relatives remained, neatly centered, as if to overcompensate for their original exposure of Palm Island as an outpost of strategic dispossession.
For Fantasies of the Good (2004) Ah Kee isolated and re-routed this notion of a photographic compensation. He re-drew the Tindale portraits by hand, but purposefully off-centre—as a protest against the ways in which the clippings, and the formal qualities of portraiture more generally, framed subjects outside of history. Whitefellanormal can be seen to continue with this work of destabilizing this photographic style that also contributed to strategic dispossion. In front of a white background, similarly removed from contextual references to (that very specific) place, Ah Kee reenacts the moment of ethnographic documentation, but ensures his forehead, one side of his face or his shoulder is always outside the shot, defying full representation.
In the video Whitefellanormal, Ah Kee interrogates the exposure of his Palm Island ancestors to the damaging formalism of colonial photography: the problems of representation that connect portraits to maps. I have written about Whitefellanormal previously as part of my work with the Pacific Rim New Media Summit 2006. What I guess is important to note when viewing in the context of this curated program are the work’s links to Vernon’s work in other media, particularly the 2004 exhbiition, Fantasies of the Good, in which Ah Kee created intricate portraits in pencil from photographs of his relatives taken on Palm Island in North Queensland.
Palm Island was, essentially, a penal colony for Pacific Islanders and Indigenous people from various tribes all over Queensland who resisted being compulsorily moved on to ‘reserves’. Anthropologist Norman Tindale travelled to Palm Island in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1960s as part of his project to map the boundaries of Australian indigenous tribal lands and language groups. The map which resulted from this was the first to present a continent-wide cartographic representation of Indigenous nations and language groups to a white Australian public. In their contentious allocation of fixed territories to diverse tribal groups, the maps presented key evidence in countering the doctrine of terra nullius.
The convincing formal argument that the drawings in Fantasies of the Good made, is that the photographs in Tindale’s archive betray a clinical distance in the gaze through which this project of turning grounded histories into mapped data is achieved. Ah Kee’s relatives (Mick Miller and George Sibley), dressed smartly for their picture, held just a catalogue card with only a number on it to represent and distinguish themselves from every other numbered Indigenous identity. Subsequent copies of these troubling images were ‘formally’ censored by the government of Queensland in so far as they were heavily cropped: only the heads and shoulders of his relatives remained, neatly centered, as if to overcompensate for their original exposure of Palm Island as an outpost of strategic dispossession.
For Fantasies of the Good (2004) Ah Kee isolated and re-routed this notion of a photographic compensation. He re-drew the Tindale portraits by hand, but purposefully off-centre—as a protest against the ways in which the clippings, and the formal qualities of portraiture more generally, framed subjects outside of history. Whitefellanormal can be seen to continue with this work of destabilizing this photographic style that also contributed to strategic dispossion. In front of a white background, similarly removed from contextual references to (that very specific) place, Ah Kee reenacts the moment of ethnographic documentation, but ensures his forehead, one side of his face or his shoulder is always outside the shot, defying full representation.
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Screening notes for individual works
John Gillies (AUS)
Divide 2006
DVD, colour, sound, 23:00mins
A voice speaking from the Old Testament - of the colonisation of the land of Canaan through the genocidal acts of the Israelites - is juxtaposed over a group of non-indigenous male figures journeying into an Australian landscape. The cultural layering and ambiguity in Divide speaks of the foundation of Australia, it's current fears and neuroses and the intruder as both destroyer and powerless witness. Sheep flock together in fear and panic, but are easily led by leaders who wander across the country, unreconciled. Divide stars 4 men, 35 sheep, a Chinese opera singer and a horse.
Stella Brennan (Aotearoa/NZ)
South Pacific 2007
DVD, colour, sound, 10:30mins
This evocative work explores the legacy of World War Two and the impact of that era’s technologies on geographical and narrative perceptions of the Pacific. The video blends ultrasound, radar and grainy aerial footage with running text. The artist as channel-hopper, Brennan introduces the viewer to competing visions of the Pacific's oceanic space: as a technicolour musical, a network of runways, a sea of islands. South Pacific is haunted by colonial fantasy, wartime reportage and outmoded spatial visualization technologies.
Rachel Rakena (Aotearoa/NZ)
Pacific Washup 2003
DVD, colour, sound, 6:00mins
Pacific Islanders traditionally trace lineage along ocean currents, through historic connections to specific Island homelands. This Performance Space collaboration is the creation of three artists who had not previously met: Maori artist Rachael Rakena, and Fez Fa’anana and Brian Fuata, Australian performers of Samoan heritage. Pacific Washup presents their performative take on the Pacific Island diaspora. The plastic stripy bags that roll on to Sydney’s Bondi beach in this work are recognizable to many as a cheap and easy way to gather and lug belongings. The artists playfully acknowledge their ubiquity as the typically chosen luggage of relocation for young Islanders migrating to Australia from Pacific homelands. This work touches on the importance of the sea in narrating identity, as well as the economic and cultural challenges that accompany this contemporary rite of passage.
Merilyn Fairskye (AUS)
Connected 2002-2006
DVD, colour, sound, 25:16mins
Local knowledge, anecdote, and radical conjecture are imbricated to address the impact of US satellite tracking station, Pine Gap, upon the community of Alice Springs in Central Australia. Officially named the Joint Defence Facility, Pine Gap was established in the 1960s as the result of a post-Cold War treaty between the American and Australian governments. While much of its operation remain secret to Australian government representatives, the facilities are known to be involved in military satellite signal processing. Visual distortions and sound recordings give testimony to the awkward and longstanding coexistence of Pine Gap staff, indigenous locals, activist communities, and the facility itself.
Vernon Ah Kee (AUS)
Whitefellanormal 2002
DVD, colour, sound, 0:30mins
Whitefellanormal is a short conceptual work of text and performance, informed by the problems of representation that connect portraits to maps. Anthropologist Norman Tindale traveled to Palm Island from the 1920s-1960s as part of his project to map Australian indigenous tribal lands and language groups. Brisbane-based artist, Vernon Ah Kee first discovered his relatives in these images, holding a catalogue card with only a number on it to represent their identity. They were relegated by force to Palm Island - essentially a penal colony for indigenous peoples who most strongly resisted resisted relocation. On the official versions of these image that were released to Ah Kee, the numbers were cropped off, alongside any references to the place of Palm Island. Only a head and shoulders remain, neatly centered. In Whitefellanormal Ah Kee performs these portraits purposefully off-centre out of an interest in retaining evidence of the uncomfortable local truths of strategic dispossession.
Peter Alwast (AUS)
At the Rotunda 2005
DVD, colour, sound, 20:00mins
This disaffecting conceptual video work employs documentary tropes to explore discrete vernacular takes on belonging. Invited by the artist, a local politician addresses a crowd of gathered residents at the Colgate Palmolive Park in Queensland’s Gold Coast, detailing local government achievements. A representative from Colgate Palmolive publicizes strangely parallel commitments to community, and a group of youths in fancy dress perform a series of language ditties for the crowd. Alwast’s ambivalent, ambling camera explores the role of language in the construction of community and place on one overcast afternoon in the Australian suburbs.
Divide 2006
DVD, colour, sound, 23:00mins
A voice speaking from the Old Testament - of the colonisation of the land of Canaan through the genocidal acts of the Israelites - is juxtaposed over a group of non-indigenous male figures journeying into an Australian landscape. The cultural layering and ambiguity in Divide speaks of the foundation of Australia, it's current fears and neuroses and the intruder as both destroyer and powerless witness. Sheep flock together in fear and panic, but are easily led by leaders who wander across the country, unreconciled. Divide stars 4 men, 35 sheep, a Chinese opera singer and a horse.
Stella Brennan (Aotearoa/NZ)
South Pacific 2007
DVD, colour, sound, 10:30mins
This evocative work explores the legacy of World War Two and the impact of that era’s technologies on geographical and narrative perceptions of the Pacific. The video blends ultrasound, radar and grainy aerial footage with running text. The artist as channel-hopper, Brennan introduces the viewer to competing visions of the Pacific's oceanic space: as a technicolour musical, a network of runways, a sea of islands. South Pacific is haunted by colonial fantasy, wartime reportage and outmoded spatial visualization technologies.
Rachel Rakena (Aotearoa/NZ)
Pacific Washup 2003
DVD, colour, sound, 6:00mins
Pacific Islanders traditionally trace lineage along ocean currents, through historic connections to specific Island homelands. This Performance Space collaboration is the creation of three artists who had not previously met: Maori artist Rachael Rakena, and Fez Fa’anana and Brian Fuata, Australian performers of Samoan heritage. Pacific Washup presents their performative take on the Pacific Island diaspora. The plastic stripy bags that roll on to Sydney’s Bondi beach in this work are recognizable to many as a cheap and easy way to gather and lug belongings. The artists playfully acknowledge their ubiquity as the typically chosen luggage of relocation for young Islanders migrating to Australia from Pacific homelands. This work touches on the importance of the sea in narrating identity, as well as the economic and cultural challenges that accompany this contemporary rite of passage.
Merilyn Fairskye (AUS)
Connected 2002-2006
DVD, colour, sound, 25:16mins
Local knowledge, anecdote, and radical conjecture are imbricated to address the impact of US satellite tracking station, Pine Gap, upon the community of Alice Springs in Central Australia. Officially named the Joint Defence Facility, Pine Gap was established in the 1960s as the result of a post-Cold War treaty between the American and Australian governments. While much of its operation remain secret to Australian government representatives, the facilities are known to be involved in military satellite signal processing. Visual distortions and sound recordings give testimony to the awkward and longstanding coexistence of Pine Gap staff, indigenous locals, activist communities, and the facility itself.
Vernon Ah Kee (AUS)
Whitefellanormal 2002
DVD, colour, sound, 0:30mins
Whitefellanormal is a short conceptual work of text and performance, informed by the problems of representation that connect portraits to maps. Anthropologist Norman Tindale traveled to Palm Island from the 1920s-1960s as part of his project to map Australian indigenous tribal lands and language groups. Brisbane-based artist, Vernon Ah Kee first discovered his relatives in these images, holding a catalogue card with only a number on it to represent their identity. They were relegated by force to Palm Island - essentially a penal colony for indigenous peoples who most strongly resisted resisted relocation. On the official versions of these image that were released to Ah Kee, the numbers were cropped off, alongside any references to the place of Palm Island. Only a head and shoulders remain, neatly centered. In Whitefellanormal Ah Kee performs these portraits purposefully off-centre out of an interest in retaining evidence of the uncomfortable local truths of strategic dispossession.
Peter Alwast (AUS)
At the Rotunda 2005
DVD, colour, sound, 20:00mins
This disaffecting conceptual video work employs documentary tropes to explore discrete vernacular takes on belonging. Invited by the artist, a local politician addresses a crowd of gathered residents at the Colgate Palmolive Park in Queensland’s Gold Coast, detailing local government achievements. A representative from Colgate Palmolive publicizes strangely parallel commitments to community, and a group of youths in fancy dress perform a series of language ditties for the crowd. Alwast’s ambivalent, ambling camera explores the role of language in the construction of community and place on one overcast afternoon in the Australian suburbs.
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Program introduction
A MAAP Multi-media Art Asia Pacific touring program, curated by Rachel O’Reilly.
Practicing on uncertain ground and negotiating diffracted and bi-cultural regimes of representation, media artists from Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand work outside of stable cinematic genres to rethink historical and narrative accounts of place.
Stella Brennan reflects on the role of wartime visualization technologies in abstracting South Pacific oceanic space. Government, corporate and migrant takes on suburban belonging are played out ironically through documentary tropes in Peter Alwast’s At the Rotunda. Merilyn Fairskye uses non-synchronous audio and stylized visuals to conjure under-documented operations at the joint US military facilities known as Pine Gap, in Central Australia. Australian indigenous artist Vernon Ah Kee, video artist John Gillies, and Maori new media artist Rachel Rakena engage performance in different ways to explore the legacies of cartography, colonial allegory, and the contemporary Pacific Island diaspora.
Video Ground screens first at the Bangkok Experimental Film Festival March 26-30, 2008 and the University of Chicago - Film Studies Center, April 11, 2008. Later touring venues to be announced.
Practicing on uncertain ground and negotiating diffracted and bi-cultural regimes of representation, media artists from Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand work outside of stable cinematic genres to rethink historical and narrative accounts of place.
Stella Brennan reflects on the role of wartime visualization technologies in abstracting South Pacific oceanic space. Government, corporate and migrant takes on suburban belonging are played out ironically through documentary tropes in Peter Alwast’s At the Rotunda. Merilyn Fairskye uses non-synchronous audio and stylized visuals to conjure under-documented operations at the joint US military facilities known as Pine Gap, in Central Australia. Australian indigenous artist Vernon Ah Kee, video artist John Gillies, and Maori new media artist Rachel Rakena engage performance in different ways to explore the legacies of cartography, colonial allegory, and the contemporary Pacific Island diaspora.
Video Ground screens first at the Bangkok Experimental Film Festival March 26-30, 2008 and the University of Chicago - Film Studies Center, April 11, 2008. Later touring venues to be announced.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
