MAAP Projects
Video Ground:
Recent moving image works from Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand
Screening at BEFF5 The Bangkok Experimental Film Festival www.project304.org/beff5 Video Ground:: Blog http://videoground.blogspot.com
A MAAP-Multimedia 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 video artist John Gillies and Maori new media artist Rachel Rakena engage performance in different ways to reflect on colonial allegory, and the contemporary Pacific Island diaspora.
These experimental works dramatize the socio-political milieu out of which they emerge. Through metonymic symbolism, performance, re-enactment, audio-visual effects and interruptive text, they destabilize the ground from which singular histories or theories of place are possible.
MAAP - Multimedia Art Asia Pacific
MAAP was established in 1997 to bring focus to new media cultural content emerging from the Asia Pacific regions and Australia. Now in its 11th year, MAAP has produced several media art festivals encompassing 14 different countries including events and exhibitions in Brisbane, Beijing, Shanghai and Singapore. MAAP explores media art from a research and programming perspective and partners with arts organizations in the region (and internationally) to activate projects involving the region's major and emerging media arts practitioners. MAAP creates new networks increasing cultural contact and understanding through the experience of media arts. MAAP is run from Brisbane, Australia by founding director, Kim Machan and a dedicated incorporated board.Program Notes
John Gillies (AUS)Divide 2006
DVD, colour, sound, 30:00mins
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. A collaboration between Maori artist Rachael Rakena, and Fez Fa'anana and Brian Fuata, Australian performers with Samoan heritage, Pacific Washup presents a 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. Rakena playfully acknowledges their ubiquity as the typically chosen luggage of relocation for young Islanders migrating to Australia from Pacific homelands. Her 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, 2:00mins
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
DVD, colour, sound, 12:00mins
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.