Behaving Bodies: Australian and New Zealand Video Art

Behaving Bodies: Australian and New Zealand Video Art brings together six existing single-channel video works by Australian artists Agatha Gothe-Snape, Lou Hubbard, LaresaKosloff, Stuart Ringholt, Justene Williams and New Zealand artist Campbell Patterson, that present bodies in moments of performance.

Enacting simple gestures or choreography, in each work the body is presented variously as a site of universal signification, abstract possibility, emotional and sensual life, and personal identity. Each work collapses multiple forms, disciplines and histories – groupings of knowledge, which may themselves be thought of as bodies – within the confines of a single frame. By utilising this “inter-medium” possibility of video, the works create dynamic tensions between the figure and ground, exploring how meaning is created through the structuring of bodies and how often they resist simple reduction.

In the context of the University of the Philippines, with its strong association with the history of conceptual art in the Philippines, Behaving Bodies: Australian and New Zealand Video Art also provides an opportunity for transnational reflection on the legacies of modernism and conceptualism, and how contemporary artists interpret these in their own social and artistic climate.

The exhibition is an Asialink program supported by the Australia Council for the Arts and Arts NSW. The exhibition is co-presented by the Ishmael Bernal Gallery, UP Film Institute and plantingrice.com