Videoworks from
ZONES OF CONTACT
2006 Biennale of Sydney
15 September - 22 October 2006
Olga Chernysheva March [2005] [video still]
image courtesy the artist and Stella Art Gallery, Moscow
The Atlas Group / Walid Raad We Can Make Rain But No One Came to Ask [2005] [video still]
image courtesy the artist and Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London
CONTEMPORARY VISUAL ART PROJECTS SA 2006 Project 8 presents, in collaboration with the Biennale of Sydney, a selection of videoworks from the 2006 Biennale of Sydney. Charles Merewether, Zones of Contact Artistic Director and Curator, in the Biennale catalogue, imparts the aspiration of the 2006 Biennale as being "about the 'now' of the contemporary, bearing the disjuncture and discontinuities as much as correspondences and traversal movements of encounter and exchange" and how "the notion of zones characterises how the very notion of space (material, physical, geographical, psychological) has been defined, codified and bounded by techniques of observation and surveillance."
Depicting moments in everyday situations, as critic and writer Viktor Misiano outlines in his Biennale catalogue essay, the works of OLGA CHERNYSHEVA (Russia) "suggest 'profane illumination'... hers is an ethical and inevitably political response... a movement towards what could be called, in the words of Giorgio Agamben, 'the coming community'". CHEN CHIEH-JEN (Taipei) depicts an abandoned factory, replete with deserted computers and office furniture. Taipei based curator and critic Chia Chi Jason Wang describes this work as being "a tale about the ruins of contemporary world...(and) a parable about globalisation. Now we are all inside: no longer can there be an outside at all". The trilogy of RUTI SELA & MAAYAN AMIR (Israel/Amsterdam), is described in the Biennale Handbook by Israeli artist, curator and critic Galia Yahav as "a reflection of the process in which sadism apprehends the mind, takes over and blissfully sheds the frail coating of civility", illustrating "a fundamental rupture to the possibility of documentary filmmaking in a time that seems beyond basic humanity." Merewether explains the practice of THE ATLAS GROUP/ WALID RAAD (Lebanon/USA) as tracing "incomplete stories from the official organs of the press, the archival repositories of the law or the abandoned warehouses of history...to contest the construction of the real"; he quotes the artist, "Like hysterical symptoms, the events depicted...are not attached to "actual" memories of events, but to cultural phantasies erected on the basis of memories".
Referring to the 2006 Biennale artists, Merewether surmises that "through a careful and sustained practice of aesthetic articulation, their work bears the promise of transformation of what has taken place, assuming the risk of entry into the zones of contact in which the embrace of the notion of 'we' and of 'us becomes the place of our beginning."
Catalogue Essay (808kb pdf) by Charles Merewether