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Something for everyone! The 2017 PIAF visual arts program spans deep-rooted traditions, community celebration and virtual reality.
Renowned WA artists working in film, jewellery, performance and installation are on show at PICA, Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery and Fremantle Arts Centre. At the John Curtin Gallery, ambitious projects by a leading international artist have their Australian premiere, while at Moana a prominent Australian artist invites you to take a break in a hi-vis TV lounge.
“The program spans a range of artforms and cultures, offering immersive and participatory audience experiences,” PIAF Artistic Director Wendy Martin said. “It showcases the tremendous talent of WA artists alongside new and commissioned works from celebrated Australian and international artists.”
Leading British artist and filmmaker John Akomfrah brings Perth two new major film installations, Vertigo Sea and Auto Da Fé. Vertigo Sea is an immersive and poetic meditation on our relationship with the ocean and its role in the history of humankind. In a captivating film experience, sublime images of sea life segue into powerful footage of the whaling industry and migrants making dangerous sea crossings. Acclaimed as one of the standout works at the 2015 Venice Biennale, Vertigo Sea fuses archive material, original footage and readings from classical sources for a sweeping portrayal of the sea. In its Australian premiere, Auto Da Fé is a fictional narrative that looks at migration over four centuries. Presented as a poetic period drama, this emotive film highlights the connections between religion, persecution and migration.
International Art Space, as part of the Know Thy Neighbour program, Bianco and Kronemyer will create a mobile research centre and a month-long program of interviews, workshops, public tours, events and “saline meals” to focus attention on a facility which has provided nearly 20 per cent of Perth’s potable water over the past decade.
Interstices is a 25-year survey of the work of renowned jeweller Helen Britton, including new works inspired by the WA coast. Britton has developed an international reputation for reconfiguring metal and found materials into spectacular objects of adornment. Now living in Munich, she regularly returns to scour the local landscape, from beaches to the desert interior, in search of shells, seeds and found materials for her creations.
SPAN brings together Western Australian artists whose work in a range of media crosses divides that are personal and global, political and geographical. A life-size print of a cruise ship gangway, a series of sculptured industrial engine parts, human hair weaved on a loom, neighbours grooming each other over the fence and a musical performance based on asylum seekers – these works from Susanna Castleden, Olga Cironis, Tanya Lee, Clyde McGill and Andrew Sunley Smith enter personal space and consider where and how we live.
Take a seat in a crazily handcrafted, high-visibility living room in The Art of Trying to Control Flowers. Switch on the TV and watch the cartoons – they’ll make you smile, squirm and re- think your understanding of Australian history. Scottish-born, NSW-based artist Joan Ross works across a range of media including wallpaper, sculpture and animation. Her bold and experimental practice investigates the legacy of colonialism in Australia, particularly its effect on Indigenous Australians.
In the video installation Forgiving Night for Day, Perth artist Jacobus Capone contemplates the poetic Portuguese word ‘saudade’, an expression of deep nostalgia and longing for people, places and times irrevocably lost. Capone wrote lyrics inspired by the emotive registers of Fado music and his wanderings through the empty early morning streets of Lisbon. His song was filmed over seven consecutive days at dawn, each time performed by a different Fado singer, from seven viewpoints overlooking the city. The resulting film is an evocative meditation on how we process and express emotional states.
In a topsy-turvy photographic experience of Perth, one of Australia’s most acclaimed photographers brings the outside in. Robyn Stacey has been creating spectacular and sumptuous images since the mid-1980s and for PIAF she transforms an entire hotel room into a walk-in camera obscura. Translated as ‘dark room’, the camera obscura is an optical device that captures the external world and projects it within the room. As if by magic, the view outside spreads over the room’s interior – but upside down and in reverse. The camera obscura is dependant on the weather and the position of the sun, which makes every viewing of Magic Mirror a unique experience.
Some artists just have to speak. Some stories just need to be told. Plain Speak launches a new annual series at AGWA that presents compelling personal stories told through art. The inaugural show puts Indigenous artists in the spotlight – with 50 powerfully personal video, painting, photography, sculpture and textile works. Whether it’s a grand tale or something more intimate, these stories and histories will resonate.
Take a virtual journey to a sacred land with Martu elder Nyarri Nyarri Morgan, whose first contact with Western culture came in the 1950s when he witnessed a secret atomic bomb testing in the South Australian desert. Now with the advance of virtual reality technology you will be transported back to this desert community with Morgan as your guide. Collisions is a short, personal fi lm experience like no other. Lynette Wallworth’s pioneering work offers us the true potential of technology, to transport us to a different time and place. With Morgan we experience the dramatic collision between his traditional world view and the cutting edge of science at this confounding, profoundly emotional moment of unfathomable destruction.
Joan Ross, Not a $tone unturned, 2015, handpainted digital print
Courtesy the artist and Michael Reid Gallery, Sydney
