Alternative Media Group

EXHIBITION: DOUBLE TAKE

Author:

Amelia G

Posted:

Tuesday, 19 May 2009

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Two identical figures dressed in black sit in a black space, divided by a wall, with their backs to one another. With gradual, intuitive movements a stream of white paper is transferred from one figure to the other, forming a communication that is both blind and silent.

Young Melbourne-based artists Gabriella and Silvana Mangano came to work collaboratively after they had studied drawing separately and both found themselves attracted to video. “We’re interested in the process of drawing and how one utilises the body though this process more so than the outcome,” the sisters tell me via email, “we view our videos as drawings.”

In their enigmatic and unsettling new work Absence of Evidence the private, meditative nature of drawing is emphasised. The choreographed, synthesised and symmetrical qualities in their videos is often talked about in terms of them being twins, and here they play with notions of being doubles, two halves of a whole, or entirely separate entities.

“When you do a double take you look again at something,” says Double Take curator Victoria Lynn, “and that’s what these artists are asking you to do.” The exhibition marks the third biennial Anne Landa Award for moving image and new media work, and this is the first time the exhibition has been compiled by an independent curator, working with a specific theme.

All the works in the show have within them systems of doubles and ideas surrounding performance, split selves, imaginary identities, escapism and alter egos. While most of the video works in the show display fabrications and fabulations on a global scale or some sort of engagement with popular culture, the Manganos stand out with as having created a quiet, distilled aesthetic in an intensely private sphere.

Another standout from the show, Beijing artist Cao Fei’s Whose Utopia? is a collaborative video work created with workers from an OSRAM light bulb factory in China whereby the minutiae of factory life becomes a mesmerising sequence of collective expression and fantasy. The artist has worked extensively with her own second self, China Tracey, in the popular virtual reality site Second Life, and by encouraging escapism in these factory workers through dance and performance, she gave them licence to a ‘second life’ of their own – albeit only a temporary one.

Like Cao Fei, UK artist Phil Collins has worked with communities in the real world to create a work based on performative fantasy. For his trilogy The World Won’t Listen, Collins spent extensive periods of time in Columbia, Istanbul and Indonesia, inviting fans to be filmed performing karaoke to The Smiths. Included in the exhibition is the Indonesian chapter of the trilogy, where the passionate performers are projected onto backgrounds like the Grand Canyon, the Arizona desert and European mountain peaks, emphasising the drive to escape familiarity.

“Not all the artists in the show are celebrating double identities and escapism though,” Victoria clarifies, “some are critiquing it.” Occupying the entire centre room of the exhibition, Sydney video artist TV Moore’s video, sound and sculpture assemblages as well as 2D works like Self portrait on acid, are his attempts to interrogate the global culture of transcendence including drugs, hypnosis, club culture, therapy, masks, cover songs, brain washing and states of trance.

What becomes evident in this collection of video and new media work is that to fantasize about alternate realities is part of human nature. We have all yearned to be someone other than ourselves, and in a digital era the opportunities to act on the desire abound like never before.

Until 19 July. 
AGNSW, 
Art Gallery Road, The Domain. 10am-5pm daily,
 Wednesday until 9pm. 9225 1744 or artgallery.nsw.gov.au

Absence of Evidence video still, Silvana and Gabriella Mangano

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