Kings Commissions, is a series of commissioned new works by emerging artists. Presented as part of our mobile program, these works manifest as web-based presentations, performances and public outcomes. The commissions signal a new stage in KINGS history and continues our ongoing engagement with, and support of emerging artists.
War Mixtape, Katayoun Javan
23 December 2020 – 30 January
War Mixtape is a video collage about life in Iran during the Iraq-Iran war of the 1980s. The video is comprised of a mish-mash of images that elicit feelings of nostalgia, pain, humour and sarcasm through a seeming clash of imagery drawn from a context of war and 80s pop culture.
Collectables, Ezz Monem
15 January – 19 February 2021
Collectables investigates the narrative history of found objects which have been left on the streets of Melbourne. Considering in particular domestic objects, which may be rehoused or repurposed, the project evokes a lineage of ownership, linking disparate individuals in a unique narrative traversed by the object. The images produced in this project document a stage in this journey and aim to capture the aura of these personal histories.
The project involves multiple transformations between found object and photographic image. Initially, objects that might be collected by others are located in the street and documented but not removed. Through repeated photographing and processing, a layered image is produced which is then printed in the darkroom. This work is framed and returned to the site of the object to be freely collected by the public. Operating as a form of gift economy, these works enter the narrative thread of the original found object, while also initiating a trajectory of their own.
The locations of prints were shared via @kingsartistrun and @ezzmonem’s Instagram accounts. All the prints have now been deposited and collected either by passers-by or people actively following the project online. View Collectables here.
}.exxxxu.exxxxu.exxxxu.exxxxu{, Daniel R Marks and Mohamed Chamas
12 February – 26 March 2021
}.exxxxu.exxxxu.exxxxu.exxxxu{ is an accumulation of cross-modal collaboration, sedimented to four streams of faux video-game “Let’s Play” footage. The videos are loosely bound by the archaic biopsychology of the “four humours” (blood, phlegm, black bile, yellow bile) through which we navigate with a tangential poesis.
A symbology hardens like stomach stones in the convolutions of this navigation, re-scripting inter-facial gameplay perspectives and allowing for the perforation of an anonymous and ruined game-logic.
A networked subjectivity of panoptic dissonance here bleeds-out the clotting of agency, and recurrent cues of gamification choreograph the blooming of our “protagonist”: a feedback loop of psychogeographical self-intervention.