Film Categories: Abstraction

  • Peace

    Peace, takes its starting point from a super 8 found footage film material, and is a collaboration between me and Lisa Marr. I asked Lisa to read the word peace in 18 different languages; English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Russian, Polish, Hungarian, Greek, Turkish, Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Hindi, Urdu. Sound/Voice: Lisa Marr

  • Video Art on the Edge

    “Video Art on the Edge” explores the creative potential of videotape degradation through manipulating documentation of an historical video installation exhibition from The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (1984), turning the material failure of video into an abstract, generative force. Video is a medium with a long but limited lifespan. Although the primary components of a legible image and audio endure for many years, the process of playback and reproduction inevitably produces degradation of videotape’s material substrate, producing distortions, particularly at the bottom edge of the image, upon playback. “Video Art on the Edge” explores what may be made of examining…

  • xīn nī 廖芯妮

    xīn nī 廖芯妮 (“understanding you”) is an intimate auto-ethnographic portrait expressed through dance and digital technologies. Liaw engages in intergenerational conversations with her family and community to transform the linguistic divide between her Chinese name and its Hakka translation into a space for healing. Drawing on themes of decolonizing queerness to emphasize self-love and self-curiosity, the work explores both physical and technological attachments. Bodies made up of 3D-rendered cultural objects hold space for the stories of Liaw’s elders, while expanding the growing web of her ancestral knowledge. 

  • God Parasite

    Angels construct the body of Adam, whose mind is then infiltrated by a parasite, altering his being. Experience the loss of human identity through the ethereal nightmare of evolution: the God Parasite.

  • WAR TIMES

    An exploration of two souls inhabiting bodies from 1940’s Hungary, and the beginning of the digital age. Adoring and loathing one another until full acknowledgment that it should always be this way.

  • Abgad Hawaz

    Robin Riad’s short hand-drawn analogue film ostensibly teaches the pronunciation of the Arabic Alphabet in 28 easy steps. In actuality, the hand-drawn letters were printed using a laser jet printer onto the optical soundtrack of 16mm film, and what you hear in the film is the projector reading the letters, and interpreting them into sound. Riad uses humour to play with and sit with her mother tongue, offering a ‘false’ lesson in pronunciation. A response to a digital form of anti-Arab hate that Riad witnessed online coming out of the genocide in Gaza, Abgad Hawaz is a way for her…

  • Fusion

    Investigating the interplay and love affair between sound and image. An abstract experimental animation experience produced by drawing both sounds and pictures directly onto 35mm film.

  • Go Between

    Looking down at the Brisbane River–a play of masking and superimpositions. Sound by Samuel La France. Made in residency at Container, Brisbane and nanolab, Daylesford.

  • Der Untermensch

    Dedicated to the memory of the Second World War’s homosexual victims. This short contemporary dance film abstractly depicts the persecution of homosexuals at the hands of the Third Reich by establishing a parallel between incarceration in the camps and the physical confinement felt when freedom is suppressed.

  • Saint-Rémi

    Abandoned in the debris of a mine, a dancer is revived by the celestial energy pulsating within him. Filmed in Quebec’s former asbestos mine of Saint-Rémi-de-Tingwick, this short film features the artist’s ‘Tetrahedron’ iron sculpture in which he dances. Serving as both a prison and a pedestal, this sculpture symbolises humanity’s detrimental creations that both elevate and destroy. This duality is also echoed in the magnificent yet barren lunar landscape of the mine, which has remained sterile since its closure in 1968. Despite the desolation, ‘Saint-Rémi’ is an ode to revegetation, a hope that flora, like the dancer, will resurface…