Past

Sights and Sounds: Australia

Nov. 28 – Dec. 25, 2014

Sights and Sounds: Australia features new work by Daniel Crooks, Richard Bell, Angelica Mesiti, and Susan Norrie, selected by Wayne Tunnicliffe.

The first color video artworks in Australia were made in 1970. By 1974, Sony Portapak video cameras were widely available to artists. Early uses by artists included documenting performances and actions, as well as emulating the look and feel of television, narrative cinema, and more experimental filmmaking. Exploration of the specific properties of video itself quickly developed, and a true video art scene began to flourish. With the advent of digital media, the number of artists who use moving images as their primary medium has increased rapidly.

The field of video art in Australia is extensive and heterogeneous. I have selected works that address the broad themes of the Sights and Sounds project: home and family are important, as are ideas of place, though these concepts are in some cases explored from the perspective of those who are displaced or living in a kind of exile within Australia. The renewed global interest in performance art is also reflected in Australian practice, and video art’s intimate links with performance and documentation bring it back to where it began some forty years ago.

Wayne Tunnicliffe
Curator

Wayne Tunnicliffe (b. Hamilton, New Zealand, 1965) is Head Curator of Australian Art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Most recently he organized Pop to Popism (2014–15), the first exhibition to examine Australian Pop art in an international context.

About Sights and Sounds: Global Film and Video

This long-term series offers a rotating selection of vigorous film and video works by contemporary artists from around the world — with a particular emphasis on work being made outside western Europe and the United States.

Sights and Sounds: Global Film and Video is a long-term presentation of new film and video works made in the sphere of the visual arts. The series offers a rotating selection of vigorous works by contemporary artists from around the world. It introduces New York audiences to the latest developments in filmmaking within the art context and underlines the Jewish Museum’s holistic and global approach to the understanding and presentation of art and culture.

Sights and Sounds takes advantage of the straightforward way film and video travel: shipped on discs or streamed online, these works provide an instant connection to new creative practices from even the most remote locations.

Twenty-five international curators have selected new film and video work from their respective regions of the world—ranging from Argentina to Vietnam, Nigeria to Romania, New Zealand to China, and many places in between. Their picks are screened for one month each in the museum’s media center, which has been turned into a miniature cinema for the occasion.

The works in Sights and Sounds touch on themes significant to both Jewish culture and universal human experience: spirituality, exile, language, conflict, family, humor, history. The series creates a broad network of artistic expression and curatorial perspectives that takes stock of what is happening in film and video art at this moment in time across the globe—with a particular emphasis on work being made outside western Europe and the United States.

Sights and Sounds will culminate with a selection of highlights from the series. One work from each country will be presented in the gallery from February 5, 2016 to June 30, 2016.

Jens Hoffmann
Deputy Director
Exhibitions and Public Programs

#sightsandsounds

Installation view of Sights and Sounds: Global Film and Video in the Goodkind Media Center. Photo by David Heald.

Exhibition highlights

Daniel Crooks, A Garden of Parallel Paths, 2012, digital video, sound, 9 min., 33 sec. Artwork © Daniel Crooks, provided by the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Australia
Richard Bell, Broken English, 2009–11, digital video, sound, 11 min., 30 sec. Artwork © Richard Bell, provided by the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane
Angelica Mesiti, Some Dance to Remember, Some Dance to Forget, 2012, digital video, sound, 6 min., 4 sec. Artwork © Angelica Mesiti, provided by the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Australia