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A joint initiative of The Ian Potter Cultural Trust and the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), the Ian Potter Moving Image Commission (IPMIC) represents a ten-year commitment to the contemporary art form. The biennial award is designed to enable a mid-career Australian artist to produce an ambitious new moving image work that demonstrates a major development or shift in their practice; providing two levels of support to the successful artist: $100,000 from The Ian Potter Cultural Trust, as well as highly specialised curatorial, production and presentation expertise provided by ACMI.
From a field of impressive candidates, the third $100,000 commission has been awarded to Soda_Jerk, a two-person art collective that approaches sampling as an alternate form of history-making. Working at the intersection of documentary and speculative fiction, their archival practice has taken the form of video installations, cut-up texts, screensavers and live video essays.
The commission will make possible a new work, Terror Nullius, which will have its world premiere at ACMI in 2018. Equal parts Australian Gothic, eco-horror, and road movie, Terror Nullius is to be a rogue remapping of national mythology. By intricately weaving together fragments of Australia’s cultural history and film legacy, Terror Nullius will point towards the unstable entanglement of fiction that underpins this country’s vexed sense of self.
Terror Nullius follows on from the success of the two previous commissions, The Calling by Angelica Mesiti and Daniel Crooks’ Phantom Ride (2016), both of which received critical and popular success upon premiering at ACMI.
IPMIC Judge and ACMI Director & CEO, Katrina Sedgwick, praised their innovative work in the rapidly expanding field of moving image art; “We are thrilled to award Soda_Jerk the third Ian Potter Moving Image Commission. Their work is challenging and cheeky, clever, playful and insightful – and it stood out amongst an incredibly competitive field of applicants. Terror Nullius will confront, poke at and recontextualise the clichés, stereotypes and overwhelming whiteness of our Australian cinema history – and it’s so great that ACMI, as the national museum of film, television, video games and digital art and culture, is hosting its world premiere next year.”
Soda_Jerk spoke about their excitement in receiving the commission: “It’s a staggering honour to be selected for the Ian Potter Moving Image Commission, our collective head is spinning. But we are also ready to get to work. To be braver, graver, more ambitious, technically dexterous and politically urgent with this project. It is this commission’s incredibly generous gift of time and resources, as well as ACMI’s expertise, that will make this possible. We are epically thankful.”
Information and image courtesy of the Ian Potter Moving Image Commission
