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.