A screening of video works addressing our urgent global ecological crisis through the lens of contemporary Brazilian artists, curated in collaboration with Solange O. Farkas, Director of Associação Cultural Videobrasil (São Paulo).
Artists: Ana Vaz, Caetano Dias, Cao Guimarães, Chico Dantas and Eder Santos.
Presented at Longplay in partnership with Videobrasil, as part of Channels Festival: International Biennial of Video Art, Melbourne, 1 September 2019. Works were also presented on urban screens in Melbourne and Sydney.
Curated a program of historically significant video works from 1967-81 by Australian, European, North and South American artists, which focus on the relationship between video, performance and sociopolitical critique.
Artists: Joan Jonas, Lynda Benglis, Letícia Parente, Jill Scott, Stuart Marshall, Peter Campus, Ken Unsworth, Jill Orr, Regina Vater, Marina Abramovic, Nan Hoover, Bruce Nauman, VALIE EXPORT, Mike Parr, Richard Serra and Peter Kennedy
Presented in partnership with the National Gallery of Victoria, as part of Channels Festival: International Biennial of Video Art, Melbourne, 7 September 2019
Presented this cinematic montage of moving-image, music and instruction-based performance directed by curatorial auteur Mathieu Copeland in collaboration with live art dramaturg Tim Etchells.
A total of forty-five international artists contributed to the production of fifty-nine individual works that unfurled in a layered sequence.
Artists: Fia Backström, Ieva Misevičiūtė, Michael Portnoy, Deborah Pearson, Mac Adams, Robert Barry, Karen Mirza + Brad Butler, Lawrence Weiner, Sofia Diaz + Vítor Roriz, Meredith Monk, Susan Stenger, Nick Cave, Cosi Fanni Tutti, Mieko Shiomi and many others.
Part of Melbourne Festival, at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne 2017
Commissioned choreographer Garry Stewart, animator Ian Brown, filmmaker Sarah-Jane Whoulahan and dramaturg Rebecca Reid to produce a work examining the relationship between the body and architecture.
Fusing dance, film and visual effects in an exhilarating investigation of human movement across cultures, Uplift explored how the physical limitations of the human body dictate unexpected similarities across a diverse range of dance styles.
Participants were filmed, animated and mapped onto a unique architectural structure to give the illusion of live bodies moving in dialogue with the building’s exterior facade.
Arts Centre Melbourne, 2013
Commissioned a set of animated films by Benjamin Ducroz, Cameron Gough, Bobby Dazzler, Nick Wright and Travis Hogg.
Filmmakers were invited to produce works for presentation on a seven-metre wide panorama screen, in response to items held in Arts Centre Melbourne’s performing arts collection, including architectural plans, memorabilia and costume designs.
The program was presented as part of Hamer Hall’s relaunch celebrations, subsequent to a period of restoration.
Arts Centre Melbourne, Hamer Hall 2012
Commissioned film director Steven Nicholson and animator Thom Fraser to produce two films interpreting creation stories from the oral traditions of the Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrumg people.
The works illustrated how the Yarra River and Port Phillip Bay came into existence, and how the responsibilities and laws concerning caring for one another and the land are passed down from one generation to the next.
Arts Centre Melbourne, Hamer Hall 2012
Commissioned four animated films by live art director Tim Etchells, working in collaboration with the performance ensemble Forced Entertainment.
This four-part series of black comedy micro-films depict a dystopian landscape where two protagonists venture in endless disarray.
The artist envisaged the work as a disjointed and radically dysfunctional radio play, combined with animations that adopt an aesthetic reminiscent of graphic-novels.
Distributed via Tate Online in conjunction with a tour of live performances presented across Europe, 2011
Curated a screening of work by video art pioneers, Steina and Woody Vasulka.
The Vasulka’s have contributed enormously to the evolution of moving-image aesthetics through a prolific body of work exploring the malleability of vision, the manipulation of electronic energy and the interrelation of sound and image.
The program highlighted the artists’ early collaborative efforts, produced from 1970 to 1974, which focused on phenomenological explorations that deconstruct the materiality of electronic signals. The screening was accompanied by an in conversation with the artists.
Tate Modern Auditorium, London 2011
Curated a screening and commissioned new work by artist and theorist Ursula Biemann.
Biemann produces moving image, installation and text-based works addressing migration, mobility, technology and gender. Her experimental video essays connect theory, politics and on-the-ground cultural practices to focus on the gendered dimension of migrant labour and the geopolitics of mobility and location.
X-Mission is a 30 min film investigating the extra-territorial status of Palestinian camps and the refugees who inhabit them. The screening was accompanied by commissioned texts distributed in conjunction with excerpts from the film.
Tate Britain and Tate Online, London 2010
Commissioned an animated film by Raqs Media Collective reflecting on the way that ethnicity and ‘type’ have been characterized throughout the history of colonial settlement in India.
The film personified a set of scientific instruments, such as those once used to measure the human skull in an effort to determine levels of intelligence, as well as those currently used to extract biometric data from a passport.
Distributed via Tate Online as a prelude to an exhibition of new work at Tate Britain, 2009
Worked in collaboration with the 2008 Turner Prize nominees, Mark Leckey, Runa Islam, Kathy Wilkes and Goshka Macuga to produce four, three-minute films directed by the artists, which extended concepts explored within their exhibited artworks.
Broadcast on Channel 4 and presented as part of the Tuner Prize awards ceremony, Tate Britain, London 2008
Curated a screening of work by filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek.
The program highlighted a selection of work produced in the late 1950s and early 60s, which were stylistically in the spirit of Surrealist and Dada collage.
VanDerBeek’s experiments were driven by a pragmatic political agenda that interrogated the often absurd and irrational correlations arising between popular culture, scientific advancement and mass media depictions of global conflict.
Tate Modern, London 2008
Commissioned four, three-minute films by artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson.
Playing the role of a modern-day vampire, actress Tilda Swinton interviewed band leader and cultural policy maker Gilberto Gil, scientist and Nobel Prize winner Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn, lawyer and copyleft advocate Larry Lessig, as well as novelist and political activist Elena Poniatowska on notions of revolution, empowerment and technology.
The series examined how new and mass media mechanisms have generated change and how cultural and technological infrastructures shape the ability of individuals to have social and political impact.
Distributed via Tate Online 2008
Commissioned and produced a film by Luc Lagier featuring artist Dominique Gonzales-Foerster.
This one-hour documentary followed the artist throughout as she developed her Unilever Commission TH.2058. Transforming Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall into a post-apocalyptic shelter, the commission combined over-sized, augmented sculpture, music, film and emergency provisions.
The documentary reveals the artistic design and fabrication process, as well as the literature, natural history and cinema references that influenced the artist throughout development.
Broadcast on Channel 4 and presented as in-gallery interpretation, Tate Modern Turbine Hall, London 2008
Commissioned an episodic film series, written and directed by artist and theorist Mark America with an original soundtrack by sound artist Chad Mossholder.
Shot entirely on mobile phone, the story of Immobilité revolves around three characters existing, as if they were in the future looking back.
Reflecting critically on the fluidity of self within digital culture, the films mix personal narrative with philosophical inquiry and cyberpunk fiction to investigate the emergence of digitally constructed identities within collaborative social networks.
Tate Britain, London and Tate Online 2008
Co-curated a screening of silent films by surrealist filmmaker Maya Derren, accompanied by a specially commissioned score performed live by sound artist Ikue Mori.
Presenting a selection of short films produced in the mid 1940s, the program highlighted how Derren’s oeuvre departed from previously established idioms by adopting a highly kinetic cinematic language and a deeply embodied exploration of the subconscious.
The films were subsequently re-mastered with the new soundtrack to tour internationally.
Curated in collaboration with Stuart Comer as part of The Long Weekend Festival, Tate Modern Turbine Hall, London 2007
Directed a documentary film in collaboration with performance artist Linder Sterling.
Emerging in context of the punk and feminist movements of the 1970s, Sterling’s early career involved heading up an all-girl band, designing record sleeves and making artworks combining pornographic, commercial and religious imagery. The film documents a six-hour performance involving four punk bands, twenty women enacting 19th century Shaker rituals, archival photographs and a performance by the artist dressed as Jesus.
Distributed via Tate Online, 2006 and later exhibited as part of a retrospective titled Femme/Object at the Musée d’art Moderne, Paris and the Kestnergesellschaft, Hanover 2013
Commissioned a new work by Marc Lafia and Fang-Yu Lin.
This interactive, screen-based work re-composed scenes from the seminal 1965 film, The Battle of Algiers by Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo.
The work used computation to represent the logic of battle tactics, which were depicted in the original film as a pyramidal structure of self-organising cells. Breaking down cinema’s linear format, the work proposed an open-ended narrative in which the viewer’s intervention catalysts a set of appropriated visual events.
Distributed via Tate Online and presented as part of a group exhibition in association with NODE London, 2006
Commissioned a new work by Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries.
Korean artist Young-hae Chang and expatriate American poet Marc Voge employed their usual mix of animated, black and white typography, music and humour to produce The Art of Sleep. The work explored the linguistic and ritual constructs evident within the international, contemporary art market through the persona of an insomniac narrator.
Distributed via Tate Online and presented as part of a group exhibition in association with NODE London, 2006
Directed a documentary film in collaboration with dance artist Trisha Brown.
Trisha Brown is an American choreographer whose postmodern, avant-garde work experiments with the notion of pure movement. The film captured dramatic scenes from the preparations and execution of one of the artist’s seminal works from 1970, reimagined as a solo dancer descending down Tate Modern’s river-side façade at a perpendicular angle.
Distributed via Tate Online in association with The Long Weekend Festival, Tate Modern, London 2006
Directed a documentary capturing the dynamics of a participatory work by Surasi Kusolwong.
Drawing on the Thai custom of hospitality, One Pound Turbo Market invited audiences to participate in a frenzied sale of consumer goods imported into the UK from Asia. The installation was accompanied by a karaoke sing-along and madcap fashion parade. The film combines an interview with the artist, documentation of the shenanigans and vox pops with audience members to unpick Kursolowong’s critical investigation of the art market, modern consumer behaviour and the systems by which we ascribe value.
Distributed via Tate Online in association with The Long Weekend Festival, Tate Modern, London 2006