Contemporary New Zealand film and video artists are often called on to engage in "place-making" in public art projects and landscape film programmes. Yet moving image artists also play a role in "un-making" place by interrogating or reinventing our heroic landscape tradition. This programme traces the promise of the post-war boosterism of government newsreels (to the present "rockstar economy" rhetoric): where the neighbourly dream of State housing ends; where urban beaches are constructed from the soil of motorways; a whimsical take on the bicultural politics of air or the history of taonga collection in Dusky sound is revisited. New Zealand filmmakers negotiate landscapes of the Americas; the escalating pine beetle epidemics that have decimated forests on the West Coast of North America by Andrew Denton and Phil Dadson’s film of the isolated gorge in the Valle de Luna region of the Atacama desert, northern Chile. Moving image artists both document and construct imaginative, "post-natural" landscapes where social and biophysical ecologies and infrastructures are explored in intimate performances of the camera.
Curated by Janine Randerson and Mark Williams. Presented by CIRCUIT Artist Film and Video Aotearoa New Zealand.
Artists
Dieneke Jansen, Janine Randerson, Alex Monteith, Shannon Te Ao, Phil Dadson, Tim Wagg, Andrew Denton, Layne Waerea, and Martin Rumsby.
