Somewhere else

Faraways, 2012, 10 minMagic Miles, 2014, 15 minTelescope, 2013, 80 minAudrey Lam's films follow people in situations and places familiar to her, them and others they know. Sometimes moments and landscapes are revisited in some way to remember thoughts and time missed.Telescope is a time-lapse of reflections, changes in sunlight of Dirk de Bruyn’s backyard, assembled over 20 years. Telescope starts in Super 8 and ends with digital video, shot mostly while his family were themselves at work, somewhere else. It is an emptied landscape.Audrey Lam was born in Hong Kong and lives in Australia. She studied film and photography at Queensland College of Art. She has participated in art festivals including Next Wave, Otherfilm and Yebisu, and her films have screened at film festivals in London, Rotterdam and Oberhausen. Her work often builds on shared experiences, re-chronicling everyday encounters to reflect on the nuances of place and belonging. She has been developing new work during her Asialink arts residency at Green Papaya Art Projects.Dirk de Bruyn was born in the Netherlands and migrated with his family to Australia in 1958 as young child. He has made numerous experimental, documentary and animation films, videos and performance and installation work over the last 40 years. He was a founding member and past president of MIMA (Experimenta). His book The Performance of Trauma in Moving Image Art was published in 2014.

The Museum of Doubt

Is there a God? Does my bum look big in this? Why doesn’t my house cost only the materials used to build it? Is Video Art dead? When Peter Hill curated his first Museum of Doubt exhibition at Zeppelin Projects in Brunswick, these were some of the questions his artist friends wrote on one wall of the gallery. Those artists included Jon Cattapan, Phil Edwards, Julian Goddard, Ceri Hahn, and Peter Ellis. Others, who are also in this second outing of The Museum of Doubt, include Louise Weaver, Patrick Pound, Josh Foley and Michael Vale. How do we know what is true or false in any given visual statement? How willing are we to suspend our disbelief? And does that even matter if the artworks can be enjoyed for their own formal beauty, angst, or inquisitiveness?“I have a great sympathy with both doubt and faith as beacons for navigating this sublime universe,” says Peter Hill. “Remembering that the sublime in art, as in life and death, hovers between beauty and terror. Doubt and faith are both on the same side of the same coin – a coin that has “certainty” on the reverse. Most of the problems we face today are caused by individuals and nations being “certain” that they have the answer. Don’t listen to them. Be skeptical. The truth can be approached, as Karl Popper, the great philosopher of science tells us, but it can rarely be found. It can only be falsified.”So bring your doubt and your faith to this Wunderkammer of Super Fictions and enjoy the lightness, the darkness, and the strangeness in the works of: Glen Clarke, Josh Foley, Tony Garifalakis, Grant Hill, Peter Hill, Patrick Pound, Michael Vale, Louise Weaver and Robert Zhao.

The idea of Rome in Fascist art and architecture : the decorative program of the Palazzo dei Congressi in EUR, Rome

This paper engages with the notion of interspace by examining an understudied and unpublished cycle of mosaics and frescoes destined for the main hall of the Palazzo dei Congressi in Rome’s south-western suburb of EUR, a major building project by Roman architect Adalberto Libera. It first provides a socio-historical and aesthetic background to the building of EUR as Rome’s international exposition of 1942, which aimed to celebrate the achievements of Italian (and fascist) civilisation. It then focuses on the concept of Romanità (or Roman-ness) as a mythical and idealised past that was engaged on a number of levels as a teleological foundation for the advent (and eternity) of fascist rule. This past was adopted, interpreted and made manifest at the urban scale in the master plan of EUR, at the architectural scale in the buildings and at the interior scale in the decorative programs incorporated in each. It argues that the Palazzo dei Congressi allows us to gain further insight into the notion of interspace as it exemplifies this on a number of physical, symbolic and temporal levels. Physically, in the urban space, architectural form and interiors; symbolically, in the content and compositional layout of the mosaics; and temporally, in the use of historical elision and conflation between mythical pasts and idealised present.