Figuring Landscapes

About

Figuring Landscapes is a remarkable collection of moving-image works by 58 Australian and UK artists. The screenings focus on landscape to address questions of ecological survival, post-industrialism, gender, the touristic gaze, and uniquely in Australia, the status of indigenous people in a post-colonial society. Recently shown at Tate Modern, the first screening in the series will be introduced by Figuring Landscapes curator Steven Ball (British Artists' Film and Video Study Collection). This is the first in a series of events to be presented by Mezzanine 01 Engagement (65 mins) Tue 2nd June 7.30pm A selection of films in which landscape is experienced as a spatial encounter with specific places, journeying across distance and memory, custom and industry, on land, on water and through the air. Amongst the artists featured is Andrew Kötting who, with his folklorist's ear for the humour of the vernacular, takes a boat upstream in Jaunt; while in Petrolia Emily Richardson uses time lapse techniques to look at the oil industry on the Scottish coast. 02 Encounter (60 mins) Tue 9th June 7.30pm The political and cultural engagement with place and being on the land are unpacked and imaginatively reinvigorated in this screening. The programme includes Ann Donnelly's Political Landscape, a video interpreting Northern Ireland's conflicted landscape from the perspective of personal family history, and Vernon Ah Kee's Cant Cant (Wegrewhere) in which the iconic surfing beach of white mythology is reappropriated by Aborginal surfers. 03 Surroundings (70 mins) Tue 16th June 7.30pm This programme explores the ambiance of place as it resonates from the broad scope of the horizon to the intimacy of the closely observed. In Shaun Gladwell's Approach to Mundi Mundi, the sublime immensity of the Outback acts as the backdrop to a black-leather-clad biker. In contrast Mike Marshall's Days Like These is about the space of an English garden. 04 Enactment (70 mins) Tue 23rd June 7.30pm Figures in the landscape: human presence writes and performs the landscape as much as the landscape inscribes and enacts human presence. In Margaret Tait's Portrait of Ga, the fragmented impressions of her mother (an elderly Orcadian) form a film poem". Australian artist Patricia Piccinini makes immersive computer-generated environments which, in her film Sandman, creates a sense of terror as a girl drifts in a tempestous ocean.