Australian Centre of the Moving Image

Hitch a ride into the dark heart of Australia with Soda_Jerk's TERROR NULLIUS, a blistering, badly behaved sample-based film that confronts the horror of our contemporary moment. Equal parts political satire, eco-horror and road movie, TERROR NULLIUS is a rogue remapping of national mythology, where a misogynistic remark is met with the sharp beak of a bird, feminist bike gangs rampage and bicentenary celebrations are ravaged by flesh-eating sheep. By intricately remixing fragments of Australia's pop culture and film legacy, TERROR NULLIUS interrogates the unstable entanglement of fiction that underpins this country's vexed sense of self.

Rosefeldt’s thirteen-channel video work Manifesto questions the role of the artist in society today. Australian actor, Cate Blanchett, performs the manifestos as a series of striking monologues. The installation draws on the writings of Futurists, Dadaists, Fluxus artists, Situtationists and Dogma 95, and the musings of individual artists, architects, dancers and filmmakers. Passing the philosophies of Claes Oldenburg, Yvonne Rainer, Kazimir Malevich, André Breton, Elaine Sturtevant, Sol LeWitt, Jim Jarmusch, and other influencers through his lens, Rosefeldt has edited and reassembled a collage of artists’ manifestos.

5 channel video installation, HD colour with sound, 12'00-15'48". Music by Wang Wenwei. With a haunting lyricism and dreamlike narrative, The Coloured Sky: New Women II examines the secret desires and anxieties of young women as they come of age. The work captures a journey that has on one hand ended and on the other has barely begun. The ingenues, teetering on the brink of womanhood, frolic self-consciously in an artificially staged beach scene, aware of their burgeoning sexuality and its underlying power. The shadow of China's historic system of concubinage hangs over these contemporary scenes, as the idealized beauties negotiate a new social milieu in which future prospects hinge on appearance and the cultivation of male fantasy.

A five-channel video installation commissioned for the permanent exhibition space at the Australian Centre of the Moving Image (ACMI). “The camera doesn’t just capture us, it frames who we are and how we’re seen. Since the camera became more accessible in the mid-20th century, artists and amateurs alike have turned the lens on themselves to create a stage both private and public. This tradition is continued, amplified and transformed through reality TV, the internet and social media, the latest forms to use straight-to-camera techniques to share our common humanity, project authenticity and illuminate how a sense of self can be constructed through the moving image.”