NGV X recess: Artist film program
Free entry
The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Fed Square
Community Hall, Ground Level
Melbourne Now’s Artist Film Program presents a series of films screened daily within Community Hall. The program is co-curated with Olivia Koh from recess, a Naarm/Melbourne based online platform showcasing contemporary moving-image works. Founded in 2016, previous organisers of recess (recess.net.au) include artists Kate Meakin (2017–20) and Nina Gilbert (2018–20).
A ‘recess’ is defined by a suspension of time or a break in formal proceedings. It is also an indented space created by a natural or human building; a space connected to but apart from the rest of the building. This indent in time or space defines recess’s approach to exhibiting contemporary moving-image works, drafts and creative texts.
The Artist Film Program consists of twenty-one moving-image works with one work playing per week for the exhibition’s duration. This format puts the spotlight on Naarm/Melbourne-based artists and filmmakers while highlighting the breadth of talent and creative scope of filmmaking in the city. The program is an uncommon survey of experimental video works in a dedicated physical space, a specific area of inquiry rarely undertaken by Australian galleries or institutions (despite, or perhaps because of, video’s relative public accessibility via other means, as compared to other mediums). The works selected for this exhibition emerged from ongoing conversations with recess as well as between independent artists and curators at the NGV.
These moving-image works are not shaped by a single concept: instead, what emerges is reflective of the artists’ areas of study, their inquiries and their current concerns. Just as ‘film’, ‘video’ and ‘the moving image’ are competing and sometimes subtly interchangeable terms, the practices and identities of the artists are heterogeneous and diverse, mirroring the medium’s ability to adapt and tell stories from different locations and histories.
The first film in the program is Nikki Lam’s the unshakable destiny_2101, 2021, a 16 mm film referencing director Wong Kar-Wai’s oeuvre that evokes the Asian-Futurism of now-canonised alternative films of the 1980s and 1990s. Lam challenges the colonial nostalgia for Hong Kong generated by screen cultures by creating her own film set, where personal and collective memories meet. In contrast, James Nguyen uses a hand-held camera to conduct informal interviews with his relatives and family friends in The Camelia Economy, 2019, using their backyards as the setting for filming. Unlike many films in the ethnographic and documentary genres, where outsider observations are seemingly objective, professional and dispassionate, The Camelia Economy leads from personal experience to develop a sense of Nguyen’s community, including the maintenance and continuance of cultural practices despite the adversity of war, political exile and relocation.
Melbourne Now’s Artist Film Program highlights the determination and resilience of independent practitioners in Naarm/ Melbourne whose research and imaginings are realised on screen, often with little or no funding. Some artists turn to their studios as spaces to create works, such as Rosie Isaac’s small-scale scientific experiments and onscreen contemplations of electricity in Minor Revision (Lab Accident), 2022. From within the minute study of static electricity, the artist’s considerations broaden outwards, contemplating electricity’s relationship to pollution, technology, plastic manufacturing and the body.
Other artists, such as Peter Waples-Crowe, Moorina Bonini, Erin Crouch and Diego Ramírez, look directly to archives, found footage and digital media to interrogate systems of power that shape relationships to place, identity and perception. Stanton Cornish- Ward and Trent Crawford’s collaborative work LOCK, 2021, takes this digital approach further by merging film production stock footage with a range of AI techniques, considering how the internet and its current and future modes of production will shape cinema.
All artists in the Artist Film Program are multidisciplinary and pushing the limits and edges of possibilities for independent moving- image making. As one work is phased out at the end of each week of Melbourne Now, another appears. The sequence of works is like a string of sentences, an ongoing and brilliantly meandering conversation that takes place over the course of the exhibition.
OLIVIA KOH, Co-Founder and Director, recess, Guest Curator