Where and what is the border between film and visual art? Is it true that we see art but watch films? Such issues have been under discussion since Andy Warhol first played with film, though these days the words ‘moving image’ rather than film are used as many films are not made with actual film but with digital equipment. And it is certainly the advent of digital equipment — lighter, cheaper, quicker — that has led many more artists to make moving images part or all of their work. Maybe moving images are just a tool, but what a tool.
The biennial Adelaide Film Festival (AFF) has made a huge global mark through part-funding, and sometimes commissioning, films with its investment fund. Successful examples from the past are Ten Canoes, Look Both Ways, Lucky Miles and The Home Song Stories. For the first time in 2009, the Adelaide Film Festival Investment Fund has commissioned a visual artist to make a work to be shown during the film festival.
Lynette Wallworth’s experimental approach to the moving image has seen her develop new ways of experiencing the illusions of which it is capable. Her moving image installations are interactive in subtle and complex ways that cross the boundary between the moving image and life as they play on the emotions of the viewer. The AFF’s newly commissioned moving image work by Wallworth, called Duality of Light, will be shown at the Samstag Museum of Art along with a retrospective of other significant and award-winning works she has made over the last seven years: Hold, Invisible by Night, Damavand Mountain and Beautiful Sunset.
And the creative nexus between moving images in cinema and gallery contexts will be explored in the two-day Art & the Moving Image Symposium. Speakers include: Mexican Canadian electronic artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, senior curator, Museum of Modern Art, New York; Laurence Kardish; and Vasif Kortun, the founder of Platform Garanti, Istanbul.
Kortun is also curating Socially Disorganised, an exhibition of videos focusing on humorous urban dissent by international artists Halil Altindere, Fikret Atay, Cheng-Ta (Yu), Hala Elkoussy, Daniel Guzman, Kuang-Yu (Tsui), Minouk Lim, Ahmet Ögüt, Wael Shawky, Nasan Tur and Alexander Ugay, to be shown at the Experimental Art Foundation (EAF).
The Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia (CACSA) is showing Scratch an Aussie by Richard Bell, which uses satirical role reversal to comment on racism in Australia. The show also includes famous Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei’s Fairytale — a documentary about the passage of 1001 Chinese people to Kassel, Germany, for documenta 12 — and CACSA curator Peter McKay’s Road Movies — a local contribution by 15 Adelaide-based artists who have each made a digital video in one week with a basic camera. McKay says, “The idea is to emphasise the immediacy of the medium and cultivate the conditions to construct a coherent yet significantly improvised exhibition.”
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