OUTDOOR SCREEN PROGRAM: ORIGINAL REVELATIONS
Header Image: Adele Wilkes, Tasogare film still, (2017) , 10:14 mins.
Projecting and dissolving boundaries between self and other; spiritual and material; interior and exterior; and fiction and non fiction; these works stand in opposition to the parasitic ideologies of colonialism, patriarchy and capitalism that render the ‘other’ as an exploitable resource. Through myths and rituals that animate the spirit world, these shapeshifting films open their subjects and viewers to “original revelations of the preconscious psyche” (Jung).
A portrait of a town under the spell of a lucid dream, Tasogare by Adele Wilkes documents the uncanny threshold between day and night and the ways time is revealed though processes of entropy, cycles of nature, movement and ceremony. An impressionistic audiovisual poem moving from light into dark, reflecting the syncretism of Buddhist and Shinto philosophies and Japanese folklore. The work features Australian performance artist Mark Kleine as a character inspired by the transgender Shinto deity Ishi Kore Dome, 16th generation Japanese tea ceremony master Fuyuko Kobori performing chanoyu, biwa musician Kenji Mizoguchi playing to a chorus of cicadas, and artist Yuki Negishi performing Bon Odori.
Our sea is always hungry (2018) by Leyla Stevens is a single-channel video work that continues Leyla Stevens’ exploration of the space between documentary and fiction. Focusing on traces of Indonesia's 1965-66 anti-communist killings, the film explores how 1965 today is both remembered and forgotten in Bali. Connecting several historical trajectories around political violence, tourism, the Wallace Line, Gunung Agung, and spirits who inhabit the natural world, the film considers alternative archives that are embedded within the landscape.
In teaching the smoke to dance, Sabina Maselli projects documentation of West Javanese dancers onto smoke from the burning of rice husks after harvest. A series of unpredictable moving images emerge, gradually shifting into pure abstraction. By imprinting live images onto the inanimate world, the work invokes the notion of 'illumination', a magical revealing of animate spirits already present in the natural elements. Through this process, Maselli creates a mythological stage where living and non-living actors generate their own choreography and montage. Made at the Jatiwangi Artist in Residence program (JARF) with dancers Yayah and Trisnawati, this specific dance (Cirebonese mask dance) is passed down from mother to daughter. Music is LANGGENG BUDAYA from Randegan Mejalengka, West Java, Indonesia.
Told through recollections of youth, learning, lore, and departure, Sky Hopinka’s Fainting Spells is an imagined myth for the Xąwįska, or the Indian Pipe Plant - used by the Ho-Chunk to revive those who have fainted. Courtesy of the Video Data Bank at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
In Edwina Green’s kelp, chemical waste, both edible, a poisoned river located on the West Coast of Tasmania is layered with audio that cascades potent phrases over and over again, like an ever-flowing dialogic river of truth. The artist sees this work as critique towards continued colonial dismissal of Indigenous sacred sites.
Curated by Anita Spooner on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri People of the Kulin Nations. I pay my respect to their Elders, and to all Indigenous people of all times, and to their sovereign lands and waters.
- TASOGARE, Adele Wilkes, 2017. 10:14mins
- Our Sea is Always Hungry, Leyla Stevens, 2018. 13:16mins
- teaching the smoke to dance, Sabina Maselli, 2018. 8:30mins
- Fainting Spells, Sky Hopinka, 2018. 10:45mins
- kelp, chemical waste, both edible, Edwina Green, 2019. 3:10mins
Artist Biographies
Adele Wilkes Adele Wilkes is an artist and filmmaker whose practice encompasses moving image, sound, photography, projection and installation, with a focus on expanded, experimental, poetic and hybrid modes of documentary and cinematic storytelling. Informed by her personal history and diverse cultural identity, Adele’s work engages with ways of being and knowing that exist outside, or challenge, dominator culture, often evolving over time through complex interrelationships. She is particularly interested in the transformative potential of collaborative, participatory, experiential and ritual processes. Adele’s work has been exhibited by organisations including ACMI, Channels Festival, Aphids, Sydney Contemporary, ABC TV, Magnum Photos, Mona Foma, Liquid Architecture and various international film festivals. Her work was shortlisted for the 2019 Bowness Photography Prize and the 2021 National Photographic Portrait Prize.
Leyla Stevens is an Australian-Balinese artist who works primarily within a lens-based practice. Working within modes of representation that shift between speculative and documentary, her interest lies in the recuperation of counter histories within dominant narratives. Leyla was recently awarded the prestigious 66th Blake Art Prize for her moving image work, Kidung, which engages with Bali’s histories of political violence from 1965–66. Her work has been exhibited in Australia through artist run, institutional and regional galleries, most recently with a new commission for The National 2021: New Australian Art at the Art Gallery of NSW. She holds a Doctor of Creative Arts through the University of Technology Sydney.
Sabina Maselli is an artist/filmmaker working across film, photography, installation, live performance and expanded cinema. Sabina sees her works as sites for transformation between body, nature, identity, memory and technology, and how they manifest in the material, mystical, and mythological realms. She is a core member of the film collective Artist Film Workshop, and her work has been shown at places including Melbourne International Film Festival, ACMI, Austrian Film Museum, Mons European Capital of Culture festival (Belgium), Channels Festival, Mona Foma, CCP (Melbourne), and Sydney Contemporary. She is a recipient of various grants and commissions, and holds a Masters in Creative Media at RMIT University.
Sky Hopinka is a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation and a descendant of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians. In 2019 he was a fellow at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and at the Sundance Institute. His work has been featured in festivals and exhibitions at the ImagineNATIVE Media Arts Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Sundance, LACE, the Whitney Biennial, and the Front Triennial. Hopkina studied and taught chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. He received his BA from Portland State Uiversity in Liberal Arts and his MFA in Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres from the University Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He currently serves as the assistant professor in film production at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, B.C.
Edwina Green is a proud Trawlwoolway multidisciplinary artist, based in Narrm (Melbourne.) Her practice utilises painting, mixed media, video, sculpture, and cultural installation, in order to cross-examine the post-colonial paradigm and its effects on people and place. By prioritising First Nations narratives – former, contemporary, and emerging – Green initiates discourse that engages, provokes, and creates discomfort where necessary. Since completing a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Melbourne in 2019, she has exhibited in an extensive range of exhibitions both locally and internationally, including NSFW: Not Safe For Work, 2019, curated by Ilie Lichtenstein, THE LAB, CollarWorks, New York; Yirramboi Festival, 2019; Brunswick Music Festival, 2020; and I'LL CARRY MY OWN WATER, 2020, SEVENTH gallery, Melbourne.
Anita Spooner is an independent producer, curator, writer and editor based in Naarm/ Melbourne.
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