Sometimes voluntary, sometimes forced, sometimes with the option of returning. If you do return, there’s always a familiarity and a strangeness to the thing that you left. Like a film you have watched for a second time, you remember parts of it, familiar images flicker past. You know how it began, and how it ended.
Film is the closest thing we have to time travel.
Each work in the show pulls apart, stretches out and laments over cinematic time. Each artist has selected a film to work from, preoccupying themselves with a particular scene from their chosen film.
……….
Nicola Smith has returned to a film by Belgian structuralist filmmaker Chantal Akerman that she looked to for a series of fifteen oil paintings upon moving back to Sydney in 2015. Je tu il elle (Belgium/France 1975) was Akerman’s first feature and is in three parts. Written, directed, and starring Akerman, it is emotionally complex, aesthetically spare, and permeated with Akerman’s characteristic long takes.
Painted in oil directly onto the gallery wall, Nicola’s work for And so I left looks to the first act of the film. The scene depicts Akerman’s character Julie laying on a mattress on the floor. The walls are bare, she has consumed copious amounts of granulated sugar with a spoon, straight from a paper bag. She writes unsent letters to her former lover, and moves the furniture around. A month passes. The camera often staying static as the action moves in and out of frame. This activity/inactivity continues until the
second act where she decides to leave the apartment.
……….
Elise Harmsen has currently been working with scenes from two films in Roman Polanski’s Apartment Trilogy. Within each of the films, Repulsion (1965) and The Tenant (1976), the central character is haunted by the space they occupy. Her work forms a critical eye on the source footage she is using – both a synthesis with and aversion to the original films. A re-imaging of these scenes from her own perspective, where she parallels architectural forms and moments of domestic noir with her own living/working environment.
The work included in And so I left returns to a scene that she has previously used from The Tenant (1976) where the central character (played by Polanski himself) moves towards a window in a dream of terror. The first video in the series sees the artist stumble out the gallery’s first floor window in a manner that evokes Polanski’s final leap from his apartment dressed as the previous tenant who has been haunting him. The work pays homage to 55 Sydenham Rd (and its immanent closure), where the three artists have also shared a studio for the past four years (also nearing its end).
The second work in the series is two synchronised projections that yet again reference the same scene . A print of a window hangs slightly in front of the wall with a projection of Polanski moving towards it. The print is an image of a studio window that Elise shared with her former collaborator Jürgen Kerkovius in Dijon, France. Alongside this work is a second projection, however this time around it is of Elise moving towards a projection of the Dijon studio window.
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Nina Knezevic has used Antonioni’s The Passenger as a point of departure for her work. In the film, the central character played by Jack Nicholson assumes the identity of a man he finds dead in a hotel room identical to his and who also has a distinct physical likeness to him. He first swaps clothes and later swaps the photos in their passports.
It is this switching and swapping of identity that Nina has drawn from, using it to examine her own experiences of immigration and the ability of immigration to both amplify and dissolve an identity, making the self seem more fluid and its construction more evident.
The work takes it’s form from the structural nuances in the film – the way the film marks time, memory and the construction of identity. Nina’s imminent departure to her home city of Belgrade further informs the work. In her video, Nina lays on the sand at Botany bay, planes fly overhead, folders that are constructed from materials used to make passports fall from above. Red for Serbia, mid blue for New Zealand and dark blue for Australia -each drop punctuating a new stamp on her passport from the past 20 years. Alongside her video work sits her studio table, a lonely shoe and scattered photocopies of documents. Remnants of someone who
got up and left.
And So I Left
Elise Harmsen / Nina Knezevic / Nicola Smith
2-18/3/18