The Art Gallery of New South Wales is pleased to present Medium Earth, an online exhibition of Together In Art New Work by contemporary Australian artists: Gabrielle Brady, Taloi Havini, Karrabing Film Collective and mudmind (Ama Josephine Budge, April Lin 林森 and Sam Smith).
In a year of bushfire and pandemic there is growing awareness that we live among other creatures on an environmentally fragile planet. Conceived of and created during COVID-19, Medium Earth is an exhibition for the digital realm presenting four vignettes of multispecies encounter.
From camels in the southern Gobi desert to a reanimated thylacine (Tasmanian tiger) roaming the Art Gallery of NSW, Medium Earth is an invitation to consider the vital ecologies that bind species together.
Art Gallery of NSW director, Dr Michael Brand, said Medium Earth follows the success of Together In Art New Work exhibitions Hyper-linked, Wiṟuṟa Kanyini and From my window.
“Medium Earth is our fourth New Work exhibition for the digital realm, realised as part of the Gallery’s commitment through Together In Art to directly support Australian artists during these challenging times. Reaching audiences around the world, each exhibition presents new and urgent perspectives on a year of change and upheaval.
“Medium Earth is the result of artistic collaboration across closed borders – from New York City to the Northern Territory, Berlin to Sydney. The exhibition is both playful and searching, drawing attention to our interconnections with the natural world,” Brand said.
Curator of film, Ruby Arrowsmith-Todd said the exhibition showcases how contemporary moving image artists are creating new stories for a changed world.
“During the past year, life, home and habitat for humans and animals – in New South Wales and beyond – have been impacted by bushfire, pandemic and climate change. In the face of this disruption, these artists are looking to the connecting threads between species and the environment. Medium Earth presents works of resilience and rupture.
“To chart new courses in our entangled world, these artists invoke creaturely apparitions, sci-fi hybrids and Indigenous ancestral knowledges which have recognised and sustained the relations between species since time immemorial.” Arrowsmith-Todd said.
Taloi Havini (Hakö) replaces the Gallery’s own guides with Benji, a ghostly Tasmanian tiger resurrected from extinction. Inspired by a dream, Havini reworks archival footage of the last-known surviving thylacine at Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart (nipaluna). Freed from captivity, Benji returns to stalk the Gallery.
Acclaimed filmmaker Gabrielle Brady (Island of the hungry ghosts 2018) makes captivating documentaries about human and non-human migrations. Her work River Undain 2020 transports viewers to the Mongolian desert where camel herders tend to a landscape haunted by its past.
From the northwest coasts of the Top End of the Northern Territory, Karrabing Film Collective delivers a powerful manifesto. Following a successful exhibition at MoMA PS1 in 2019, this new video series explores the practices that keep the Collective connected to their ancestors and obligated to their lands.
Finally, an alien returns to Earth in mudmind’s innovative new work which expands the possibilities for digital storytelling. Their narrator is a vegetal–human hybrid who offers a mossy embrace: ‘Do you know that all life is interconnected, across species, environs, and even worlds?’
Medium Earth is now on view on the Together In Art website.
Featured image; Taloi Havini A tulala Kinon (Spirit of the Kinon) 2020 (still) single-channel digital video. Courtesy the artist. An Art Gallery of New South Wales together in Art New Work 2020 (c) Taloi Havini