|
Indepth Arts News:
"Witness: Darren Almond, Brenda L. Croft, Zhang Huan, Whitfield Lovell, Walid Ra’ad/The Atlas Group, Fiona Tan"
2004-03-12 until 2004-05-16
Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney
Sydney, ,
AU Australia
Museum of Contemporary Art Senior Curator, Rachel Kent, who curated the highly successful exhibitions Neo Tokyo (2001) and Liquid Sea (2003), has this time turned her attention to memory. Featuring work by international artists WITNESS investigates ideas and notions of memory, how memory changes over time and how interpretations of history are shaped and created. This exhibition runs until the middle of May.
Renowned for his innovative use of video technology young British artist Darren Almond presents Oswiecim (1997), a black and white film work about history, loss and the passing of time. Australian Indigenous artist, curator, lecturer and freelance writer Brenda L. Croft, presents two recent photographic series which blend layers of images and words to explore family histories and personal identity and the relationship between Indigenous communities and Christianity. Chinese-born performance artist, sculptor, and photographer Zhang Huan presents two works, Family Tree (2000) and Peace (2001), exploring issues of humanity, finality, hope and ancestry. American artist Whitfield Lovell uses his personal archive of late nineteenth and early twentieth century studio photographs of African Americans as the basis for his charcoal drawings which, combined with found objects, create three-dimensional works that bring ghost-like strangers from the past directly into the viewer's world. Exploring the notion of the archive is Lebanese artist Walid Ra’ad/The Atlas Group. Based in Beirut and New York, Ra’ad’s new installation explores the real and the fictional in relation to recent Lebanese political history. Also drawing from archival sources, Indonesian-born artist Fiona Tan presents her acclaimed film work Facing Forward (1999), comprising an imagined conversation between Marco Polo and Kubla Khan, and haunting archival imagery of the European colonial presence in turn-of-the-century Asia.
IMAGE
Zhang Huan
Peace, 2001
Detail
Cast bronze and wood
Courtesy Bernardo Paz, Brazil and © Zhang Huan
Related Links:
| | 
|
