The Anna Schwartz Gallery is reopening in February this year with a large-scale video art exhibition featuring a series of highly-acclaimed artists.
Featuring Alberta Whittle, Cyprien Gaillard, Sarah Morris, Haris Epaminonda, Yael Bartana, James Nguyen & Victoria Pham and Hiwa K, each artist will showcase individual videos, which the gallery will turn into an evolving exhibition over time.
The exhibition has a particularly massive scope: the video installations take in the length and breadth of modern life. Their collaborative and transitory nature is a comment on the increased importance of video-communication as our principal method of sharing ideas.
What you need to know
- Peripheral Vision is an upcoming video art exhibition at Anna Schwartz Gallery
- It’s running from 2 February – 7 May 2022
- It’s being held at Gallery 01, Anna Schwartz Gallery
Keep up to date with Melbourne’s latest art events, exhibitions and performances here.
The exhibition will feature the works of leading international video artists transforming the gallery space including:
- Barbadian-Scottish artist and upcoming representative for Scotland at the Venice Biennale, Alberta Whittle with her work Holding the Line, looking at colonial histories, police brutality and imagined futures offering time and space for healing and reset.
- French artist Cyprien Gaillard’s Ocean II Ocean that connects disparate, evocative references into a concerto of images, sound, and movement. The film is divided into two main sections that follow upon each other in an infinite loop as well as a soundtrack produced by Gaillard.
- American and British artist Sarah Morris’ Beijing, observing the overwhelmingly perplexing and contradictory economy and politics of China. The film explores the spectacle that unfolded during the opening of the 2008 Olympics. Shot from multiple perspectives and given unprecedented access by the International Olympic Committee, Beijing captures the variances within the city, from the urban routine of its citizens to the choreographed actions of various heads of state.
- Cypriot artist Haris Epaminonda with her works Chimera and Japan Diaries. In Chimera, Espaminonda combines found-footage shots with a soundscape by Kelly Jayne Jones and creates meditative images. Japan Diaries is a digitized version of a work on Super 8 film shot by the artist during her two-month residency in Japan in the summer of 2019, capturing momentary encounters with the many signs, codes and other symbolic gestures in Japan that caught the artist’s attention.
- Israeli artist Yael Bartana’s Tashlikh which serves as a platform for both perpetrators and survivors of various genocides or ethnic persecutions – the Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide, as well as Sudanese and Eritrean ethnic cleansing or civil wars – to confront their personal material links to the horrors of the past. Inspired by the Jewish custom of “Tashlikh” where casting bread or other objects into a river symbolises a relinquishing of sins, Bartana’s work generates a new ritual that consists of the deliberate discarding of objects as a means of psychological liberation.
- Vietnamese-Australian artists James Nguyen & Victoria Pham’s, will present a new video, a Drumstick is a Hammer, that continues the ongoing project titled Re:Sounding. Re:Sounding explores one cultural object’s changing meanings over time and across cultures. The sound of the Đông Sơn drum is pivotal to the Vietnamese sense of identity, resonating across two millennia of religion, war, exile and return. This multi-faceted project explores the Đông Sơn drum from all angles: as a spiritual object, cultural icon, token of trade and instrument of warfare. a Drumstick is a Hammer is a three part video and sound collage on the violence of infinite distance.
- Hiwa K’s Pre-Image which documents a performance in Porto, Gdansk and Vienna, among others, and between Greece and Rome along the way. Interpreted as a reconstruction of his migratory past, of which he has no photographs, the performance could also be called a ‘post-image’. Wearing a bar on which motorbike mirrors are mounted on his forehead, the distorted vision allows him to re-experience the lack of stability in the midst of his constant state of movement during his migration.
“After the past two years of uncertainty and closures, we’re embracing a flexible and experimental approach in 2022,” Tania Doropoulos, Director of Anna Schwartz Gallery, said.
“We open with Peripheral Vision, a group exhibition that takes the form of a series of singular presentations over the course of a few months. Importantly, the exhibition places emphasis on an embodied relationship to viewing video that has been largely lost in recent months.”
Head here for more information.
