The evolving Moving Image Program at Adelaide Festival Centre displays large-scale digital artworks at the King William Road entrance to the Festival Theatre. Artworks change each month and submissions are open to artists around the world.
Location: King William Road - 24 hours per day, 7 days per week
December
CAPITAL WASTE, marine_digital_conservation_SA_2023.exe, moving image (still), 5 minutes
CAPITAL WASTE is a cinematographer and video artist living on Kaurna Country. Their work moves between mediums of feature film, live visuals, music videos, video installations and experimental 3D animation. He is fascinated by the cyborg interactions of how humans interface with machines and enjoys bringing the beautiful imperfections of the human experience into the often sterile digital space.
We live in a time of crisis climate, a time of destruction, displacement, extinction and loss. Think of the Pacific Island nation, Tuvalu who are under existential threat from rising sea levels and in a last chance effort are digitising their entire island to try and to preserve their remaining cultural heritage for future generations before it is swallowed by rising sea levels due to humankind’s obsession with fossil fuels. Think also to the thylacine where the only remains of this now extinct Tasmanian Tiger is a handful of pelts and 80 seconds of silent, black and white 8mm footage. Even if we upscale and colourise this shaky footage, these remaining artifacts don’t do justice to the natural wonder of an entire species. And as the temperatures, sea levels and extinctions rise we will be faced with more devastating loss of the biodiversity and natural wonders of planet earth. This work was created as part of the Make|Shift Exhibition facilitated by The Mill Adelaide and assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, with support from City of Adelaide and Illuminate Adelaide.
November
Alinta Krauth, Reimaginings (what comes after the fire) 2023, digital video, 12 minutes
Reimaginings (what comes after the fire) is a highly personal video artwork by Australian artist Alinta Krauth, developed during residency in Scandinavia. This work is born from the artist’s lived experience of Australian bushfires in 2019/2020 and working with wildlife rescuers and biology researchers to attempt to help flora and fauna in the aftermath. Her long-term practice in wildlife rehabilitation has helped to drive her understanding of what comes after fire, who is impacted most, but also, who can grow and thrive in the wake of what is otherwise a shocking situation. The work tells the story of the reality of certain Australian forested areas, where there is little hope that native plants and animals will return. This work further considers how the process of creating can be a form of healing, as sifting through her own personal footage and stitching it together in this work has opened old sadnesses, then attempted to set them free.
Alinta Krauth is a multidisciplinary new media artist and interaction designer. Her current focuses include the use of video art, mobile interactive devices, and sensor–based art as a response to more–than–human agency and animal inclusivity. Much of her work involves ecological themes and scientific fieldwork alongside ecology experts and wildlife rescue organisations.
2023 Archive
The Democratic Set, Back to Back Theatre, 8 minutes
Award winning Back to Back Theatre’s latest version of their short film project, THE DEMOCRATIC SET Seoul, South Korea. Tantalisingly strange yet oddly familiar, the film utilises a custom-made set – a neutral room framed by two opposing doors – giving rise to a swift succession of live performances and screen-based video portraits, all created in collaboration with communities.
THE DEMOCRATIC SET Seoul, South Korea is a cavalcade of portrait, soapbox, and drama, inviting you, the viewer, to be delighted and entranced by the unusual, the comical, the moving and the occasionally provocative carousel of scenes as they glide quietly by.
Based in the Victorian regional centre of Geelong, Back to Back Theatre is widely recognised as an Australian theatre company of national and international significance. The company is driven by an ensemble of actors who identify as having an intellectual disability or are neurodivergent and is considered one of Australia’s most important cultural exporters.
Kelly Reynolds, Pigeon (excerpt), 11 minutes
‘I have been working daily and locally to befriend pigeons. I have sought advice from celebrities: former world boxing champions Mike Tyson, George Foreman (aka ‘Big George’) as well as Her Majesty the Queen of England. No reply from Mr Tyson, however Foreman suggested I read more and the Queen referred me to online resources.
My research included observing pigeons body language has led me to investigate: walking like a pigeon, cooing, feeding, sprouting my own bird seed, attempting a telepathic connection and commissioning a physic reading for a bird I met. Thus far, birdseed and telepathy are the only things that helped me to better connect with pigeons.’ Kelly Reynolds, 2023
Kelly Reynolds graduated from Adelaide Central School of Art with first class Honours (2017). Her field of practice encompasses video, performance, ceramics and installation. Reynolds navigates dominant and normative systems under her own terms. She is interested in objects on the edges of ownership and seeks out peripheral, queer and verge spaces.
Brodie Kokkinos - In Exchange for Silence, 5:00 mins
Brodie’s practice deals with the undercurrents of imagery and their psychosensorial push and pull upon the spectator. Works act as conjugates for the malevolent forces within image-making systems like advertising, film, cinema, and even contemporary art. Her elaborate reconfigurations act to intervene in their spectral powers, redirecting them as they are in play.
‘In exchange for silence is a video featuring three femmes walking towards the viewer—forever. Indeed, while their bodies are in incessant motion, they never move forward. They stay caught in a paradoxical state of movement and stasis, which creates a disorienting effect on the viewer (as I learned at the gallery opening, it is a smooth effect achieved with painstaking levels of compositing).
As one encounters the work, we experience a wonderful strangeness walking towards these figures, evoking an encounter with someone we will never truly meet, as they approach us without reaching a destination. Then there are the perceptual distortions that occur when one stares for long enough at the video, as they begin to resemble giants missing one half of their bodies. The question of where they are going becomes loaded with obsessive weight, with every step forward reiterating intrigue (on repeat).’ Diego Ramirez.
Amber Cronin, And Now for the Sun in the Heavens, 2023, digital video, 7 minutes
Amber Cronin and Susan Bruce’s Moving Image works on the Media Screens are part of SALA Festival. They are both finalists in The Advertiser Contemporary Art Award.
Centred around transformational aspects of performance, the slowness and meditative nature of this short film by Amber Cronin (DOP Ben Golotta) highlights the ritual of transformation integral to theatre, performance and life more generally. Set inside a car, the artist’s father, a professional clown, now a man old man, methodically builds layers of makeup to complete his costume, the evening light and the close-up framing draw the viewer into an intimate moment that speaks of personal memory. A deep melancholy and the softened, sentimental nature of this short video work gifts us an insight to the everyday realities of artists.
This work centrally deals with transformational aspects of performance, character, and costume. It takes one of theatres oldest troupes: the clown and contextualises the human aspects of this character through attentively capturing the transformation from man into character.
Susan Bruce, Through My Lens, 2023, moving image, 3:40
Susan’s practice includes moving image work, experimental short films, collage, drawings, prints and artist books. Her moving image work has been shown in Australia, Asia, Europe and the United States in galleries, video and film festivals, and public spaces.
Susan is inspired by the textural qualities of film and the interrelationship between digital and analogue. Her process upends the ‘normal’ hierarchy between analogue and digital: my collages serve as the material that is manipulated and textured to form my digital work, and vice versa.
‘I have created my own landscape by ripping, photographing, drawing, and painting a changing landscape. Portals are used throughout as a metaphor for a lens. There are people situated inside the landscape; construction workers, hikers and someone nestled inside the arm of a crane - and they are made to look small. Also, mobile towers start to appear in the landscape, and seem to be trying to look like trees. Gradually, the towers have increased.’ - Susan Bruce
Tanya Voges, Dance for Tender Times, 8:00 mins
Dance for Tender Times is for everyone going through a transformational change in their life, dealing with their own healing, or travelling through a chapter of their lives alongside another person's journey toward health.
Dance for Tender Times speaks to the changes on a cellular level of a body working through a cancer diagnosis toward health. The supporting hands could symbolise the medical staff juxtaposed with the metaphor of the loss of sensations in the extremities that occurs for some patients undergoing treatment for their cancer.
New Light 2023
Presented by Illuminate Adelaide and ANAT, NEW LIGHT 2023 showcases experimental and diverse moving image works by contemporary First Nations artists.
Following a national call out, NEW LIGHT 2023 features commissioned work that explores compelling and complex concepts, with artworks being exhibited on the media screens at the entrance to Adelaide Festival Centre as part of Illuminate Adelaide’s City Lights program.
CHANTEL BATES: ECHOES
Echoes draws on commonly shared experiences of Indigenous people in Australia and focuses on Chantel’s intrinsic relationship with land and Country. This knowledge then echoes. Their bloodlines echo. Their teachings echo. But do these echoes stick around? Or merely come and go with their spirits? Chantel’s contemporary video art explores these experiences and shares the histories of the landscapes that surround us. To deeply connect with Country as it lives and thrives through yesterday, today, and far into the future.
Chantel (Shonny) Bates is a proud Murri woman with connections to Wakka Wakka Country. She is an emerging mixed media artist, interdisciplinary designer and visual communicator currently located in Meanjin. Her contributions to the Indigenous community are formed organically through connections with mob, she is devoted to strengthening and promoting inclusion of First Nations voices in the development Indigenous art. Heavily inspired by community, she takes pride in using her knowledge to create storylines that hold an impactful voice for herself and those around her. She holds a Bachelor of Design from Queensland University of Technology majoring in Visual communications. Chantel incorporates her ever growing knowledge of Country into teaching and takes pride in reclaiming this rich culture to implement an Indigenous voice into future learners.
JONATHON SAUNDERS: ONE MINUTE TO MIDNIGHT
One minute of explosive authentic animated Australian Superhero Action! Indigenous superhero Zero-Point stops a mugging by some post-humans during a midnight patrol. When it comes to diversity in media, Jonathon goes by the philosophy of being the change you want to see. The character Zero-Point is a love letter to everything he enjoyed in comics and animation. Jonathon wanted to create a cool superhero that just happened to be Indigenous, instead trying to make an ‘Indigenous Superhero’ as there is no one way of being Aboriginal. Jonathon wants One Minute to Midnight to entertain and inspire young artists to create their own stories and start animating.
Jonathon Saunders is a Darwin based Indigenous illustrator and animator. While born and raised in Darwin, Jonathon is a member of the Woppaburra indigenous people, from the Kanomie clan of Keppel Island in Queensland. Jonathon’s artwork focuses strongly on comic book and superhero iconography and re-contextualizing those images within an Australian urban setting. Jonathon explores the themes of morality, heroism and identity. Jonathon is the creator of the award winning animated mini series Zero-Point Season Zero. Jonathon is a remote animator and storyboard artist for Studio Gilay, he is also the co-creator of Wild North Comics, an anthology comic that features comics from artists around NT and beyond. Jonathon regularly publishes new Zero-Point stories in Wild North Comics.
Sara Pathirane and Laura Pietiläinen (Laura - The Light of All), Leda&friends, 10:19 mins
Visual artist Sara Pathirane and choreographer Laura Pietiläinen (Laura - The Light of All) have collaborated since 2019 creating a body of work ranging from video works to exhibitions and dance performances merging together the languages of contemporary dance and visual arts. The artist duo is based in Helsinki, Finland.
In the choreography for video Leda&friends two bird-like ones have landed on the lands of the poet Sappho on the island of Lesbos. It shows a world where bird-like ones cherish dreams, dance together with nature, love and preserve life, and brood a shared mystery: a hyacinth-coloured egg discovered by Leda. The soundscape layers Sappho's poems into whispers from timelessness and space in the oral tradition of lyric poetry.
Dave Court, House Party, 5 minutes
This video is s 360-degree fly through a digital reconstruction of a house that was the central part of my 2021 body of work, House Party. House Party is a body of work based around a painted house, set for demolition, that I was given permission to paint late in 2020. Pieces from this body of work included photographic and video documentation of the painting process, and new works building on ideas, experiments and techniques used in the house across traditional and digital media.
Emmaline Zanelli, The Creature of the Grey Lagoon, 3:10 minutes
This work imagines a modern-day morning routine of a lonely drain-dwelling creature. This super 8mm work takes the Creature from 1954 classic film 'The Creature of the Black Lagoon', and brings him almost 70 years into the future. Rather than a lagoon, the Creature sits bored in the contemporary swampy wasteland of a city drain underneath a highway. He tries to catch seagulls for food, kicks trash around to pass the time, scares a dog, and has a nap. Life is simple.
Sapphire Goss, Dark Morass, - 5:00 mins
Dark Morass is part of the series 'Liquid Nothing', a body of work that depicts tiny hidden worlds perpetually beginning, ending and merging - like infinite droplets of water. The film traverses through primordial swamplands and black water; globules, particles and cells forming and fusing. The effects are made with strange vintage optics, ice filters and liquid lenses. Shot in the Bayou in Louisiana, where creeping salinisation threatens these unique waterlands. Commissioned for SparkHouse London.
Teresa Busuttil (SA) Embodied Knowledge (Monarchs and Minestrone), - 03:21 mins
Each summer monarch butterflies migrate 4,000km from Canada to Mexico, the migration is long and the monarch butterflys lifespan is short. This means that this journey can span over four generations with each generation continuing the migration of their ancestors. This work considers the possibility that we are all inherently carrying the knowledge, skills, and memories of our ancestors.
David Morrell (SA) Avid Creations, Rolling Ball Sculpture - Sphere 3, - 04:19 mins
David is a South Australian Artist who designs and builds kinetic artworks called Rolling Ball Sculptures. Rolling Ball Sculptures, are a celebration of engineering, physics, and creativity. Over the past thirteen years, David's sculptures have been commissioned for both private and corporate clients. Over 180 of Davids sculptures are on display in private collections, businesses, and hospitals around the world. Every sculpture is hand built, and unique. All sculptures are designed based upon the requirements of the client. Rolling ball sculptures capture the imagination of children and adults alike!