Melbourne Now x RECESS Film Program
Experience The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia’s Melbourne Now Artist Film Program, a captivating showcase of Naarm/Melbourne-based talent on the Big Screen. Co-curated by Olivia Koh from recess, an esteemed platform championing contemporary moving-image works, this exhibition breaks boundaries with its rare focus on experimental video art. Immerse yourself in the indented spaces of time and creativity as you explore thought-provoking films, each representing the unique perspectives and inquiries of the artists. Discover the diverse narratives woven by this dynamic medium, highlighting its adaptability and storytelling prowess. Join us in celebrating Melbourne’s vibrant art scene and be captivated by the power of the moving image.
About the artworks and artists
Erin Crouch – Clean Up Efforts Underway (2019)
(b. 1984, Djilang/Geelong, Victoria. Lives and works in Naarm/Melbourne)
Erin Crouch is a visual artist who works with the moving image to create video and film installations. Her works often tease out surface tensions built up in history, such as agricultural practices on settled land in Australia. Her works explore the way these histories exist presently and manifest in individual and collective psyches.
Clean Up Efforts Underway, 2019, comprises found footage from television archives and DIY YouTube Channels, alongside landscape scenes filmed on settled farming land in contemporary Victoria. Water is a common and linking element that guides this meandering visual dreamscape and is both a uniting and dividing trope in the video. Olympic swimmer Ian Thorpe appears to a dreamer in a discourse around spirituality while natural running streams are contrasted with the chemical interventions of human-made pools. Moving fluidly itself, the video charts multiple coinciding narratives reflecting the dreamer’s subconscious state.
Crouch’s solo exhibitions and screenings include My Father My Father, Friday Night, Savage Garden, Melbourne (2021); Clean Up Efforts Underway, recess (2019); Then Daddy Takes His Place in an Australian Landscape, The Treasury Theatre, Melbourne (2018); and Under The Jumpers, TCB Art Inc., Melbourne (2017). Selected group exhibitions include False Feeling, Constance Artist-Run Initiative, Tasmania (2019); Black Box: recess, Kings Artist-Run Initiative, Melbourne (2019); THERE IS A PAIN – SO UTTER, Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne (2018); and Disinterment, MADA Gallery, Monash University, Melbourne (2017). Crouch holds a Masters degree (Fine Art Research) from Monash University (2018).
Film credits: Clean Up Efforts Underway, 2019, HD video, colour, sound, 7 min 16 sec, © Erin Crouch
Clean Up Efforts Underway will appear on the Main Screen from 4–19 July and 21–27 August 2023.
Rosie Isaac – Minor Revision (Lab Accident) (2022)
(b.1990, Naarm/Melbourne. Lives and works in Naarm/Melbourne)
Rosie Isaac is interested in art-making that imagines different material and social futures. Her research-based sculpture, writing and performance practice focuses on language as it is experienced in the body while reading, in relationships, and via social institutions.
Minor Revision (Lab Accident), 2022, explores the materiality of electricity as it is described through science, technology and embodied experience, in an attempt to dissolve the solidity of these categories. The video work challenges the dichotomy between the organic and the inorganic, considering how metallic elements are absorbed and used within the body and how our nervous systems function electrically. The work is part of a research project that explores how electrification has shaped social relations and political imagination.
In the film, small pieces of aluminium, plastic and the artist’s hair dance across a pink-hued backdrop under the influence of static electricity. Twenty-seven numbered texts appear sequentially, borrowing the form of a written ‘fill in the gap’ revision exercise. They begin by simply explaining the science of static electricity before making associative links to pollution, technology, plastic manufacturing and the body.
Isaac’s solo exhibitions and performances in Melbourne include eeeeeeeeeeeee at Flippy’s Gallery (2022); Intestine in My Eye at Next Wave Festival (2018); AGILE LIE at West Space (2017); and BACK WARD PLAY at Gertrude Glasshouse (2017). Recent group exhibitions include Person, Woman, Man, Camera, TV, curated by Chelsea Hopper and held at 99% and BLINDSIDE galleries, Melbourne (2022); Freedom of Sleep, curated by Anabelle Lacroix, Fiminco Foundation, Paris (2021); Reading Circles, curated by Rayleen Forester and Joanna Kitto for The Image is not Nothing (Concrete Archives), Ace Open, Adelaide (2021); and I Will Never Run Out of Lies nor Love, curated by Nanette Orly and Sebastian Henry-Jones, Bus Projects, Melbourne (2019).
Film credits: Minor revision (lab accident), 2022, HD video, 8 minutes 38 seconds, courtesy of the artist
Minor Revision (Lab Accident) will appear on the main screen from 4–19 July and 21–27 August 2023.
Arini Byng – (indistinct chatter) (2018)
(b. 1987, Gadigal Country/Sydney. Lives and works in Naarm/Melbourne)
Arini Byng’s ‘body-based’ work is concerned with how the affective qualities of materials, gestures and settings enter into sociopolitical conversations. Byng works with image, movement and form to negotiate political scenes and produce intimate studies of gesture and action. Her works use the body in motion as a way of unpacking familial ties and histories, physical intimacy between friends, and the interrelation of performance and screen.
(indistinct chatter), 2018, is a personal work in which the artist and her father improvise a performance, handling and passing industrial materials and objects to each other. To a score of intermittent chimes from a piano, the performers engage with the objects in a kind of dance, negotiating each other’s limbs. The everyday objects they exchange are laden with meaning, speaking to Byng’s family roots in manual labour. The objects are personal and historical markers for the performers – Byng’s father was raised in an African-American working-class family in north-east America in the 1950s and 1960s, a place and time where US manufacturing and production was thriving and employment was readily available.
The work’s title, (indistinct chatter), relates to a caption seen in films when there are multiple audible conversations taking place but no single dialogue is discernible. Similarly, details of Byng’s biography and relationship with her father remain private. The objects become wordless stand-ins for the family’s experience of race and class. Moments of comprehension and incomprehension enter and recede in this wordless exchange, as the viewer is invited to consider how each of us handles and perceives family history and memory.
Byng’s work has been presented nationally, including in Melbourne at Blak Dot Gallery, Gertrude Glasshouse, Darren Knight Gallery, FUTURES, Centre for Contemporary Photography, TCB Art Inc., Bus Projects, Neon Parc Project Space, MPavilion, Margaret Lawrence Gallery, c3 Contemporary Art Space and BLINDSIDE, and in Alice Springs at Watch This Space. Selected works have been published by Perimeter Editions and in Higher Arc, Le Roy and Photofile. Byng also has work held in the publication collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Tate Modern, London.
Film credits: (indistinct chatter) 2018; single-channel video, 12 minutes 58 seconds. Musical score: Luke Howard. Courtesy of the artist © Arini Byng
(indistinct chatter) will appear on the main screen from 21–27 August 2023.
Moorina Bonini – Gowidja (After) (2021)
(Yorta Yorta/Woiwurrung b. 1996, in Naarm/Melbourne. Lives and works in Naarm/Melbourne)
Moorina Bonini is a proud descendant of the Yorta Yorta Dhulunyagen family clan of Ulupna and the Yorta Yorta and Wurundjeri Briggs/McCrae family. Bonini’s practice is informed by her experiences as an Aboriginal and Italian woman and re-examines the lived experiences that have influenced her cultural identity.
In Gowidja (After), 2021, Bonini intersperses newly filmed and found footage to ponder the past of First Nations people and propose a new future. As the fragments of imagery accumulate on the screen, Bonini questions past and present representations of First Nations people and their cultures. Using the moving image, Bonini presents an Indigenous-led future, where all centralised governance and power has been dispersed among Indigenous people and communities. In this future, First Nations people have ownership of their cultural materials and objects, autonomy over their representation and agency to achieve self-determinism. Bonini’s practice is based within Indigenous knowledge systems and brings this to the fore, unsettling the narrative placed upon Aboriginal people as a result of colonisation.
Bonini’s work has been exhibited in galleries and institutions across Australia and internationally, including the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), Melbourne; The Shed, New York; Sydney Festival; Blak Dot Gallery, Melbourne; Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne; and the Koorie Heritage Trust, Melbourne. She has produced and co-curated art and cultural programs across RMIT University, the University of Melbourne and Shepparton Art Museum, and is a PhD Candidate at Monash University within the Wominjeka Djeembana Research Lab. Bonini is currently a studio artist and member of Victorian-based Indigenous emerging artist collective, this mob.
Gowidja (After) was commissioned by ACMI for Unfinished Camp, 2021.
Film credits: Gowidja (After), Moorina Bonini, 2021, single channel video, 7 minutes 29 seconds, © Moorina Bonini
Gowidja (After) will appear on the main screen from 21–27 August 2023.
Tony Yap – Animal/God (2021-23)
(b. 1956, Melaka, Malaysia. Lives and works in Naarm/Melbourne)
Tony Yap is an accomplished dancer and multidisciplinary artist who explores and creates an individual dance-theatre language informed by psychophysical research, Asian shamanistic trance dance, butoh and ‘psycho-vocal’ experimentations.
Animal/God, 2021–23, was made in response to the death of Yap’s friend and collaborator, the Italian composer and musician Ezio Bosso. Soon after learning of Bosso’s death, Yap filmed an impromptu dance at the Abbotsford Convent in the natural light of a nearby window. Playing Bosso’s piece Unconditioned: Following a Bird (2021) on a speaker, Yap dances a tribute to his friend, a testament to their shared practice of entering into a state of trance during a performance. Describing this experience, the artist said: ‘In my state of trance I had a glimpse of a lost being following the guide of a little bird in its flight out of darkness at his last moments of life. I too followed that bird in this dance to Animal/God.’
Yap has been a distinct figure in inter-cultural discourse in Australia. He received Asialink residential grants in 2005 and 2008, as well as a Dance Fellowship from the Australia Council for the Arts, and is the founding Creative Director of Melaka Arts and Performance Festival – MAP Fest. Yap brings a non-Western perspective to the development of contemporary dance and performance practice that is grounded in Asian philosophies, sensibilities and forms.
Film credits: Animal/God (2021-2023), single channel video, HD, 6 minutes 13 seconds © Tony Yap
Animal/God (2021-2023) will appear on the main screen from 21–27 August 2023.