PROTOTYPE presents Portrait of a Place: an evening of screenings at KINGS Artist-Run. This is the first in a series of public screenings based at KINGS Artist Run, inviting leading Australian based moving image platforms to curate an evening of experimental screenings within the gallery.
Portrait of a Place is a collection of PROTOTYPE commissions thinking about what we call place — a physical area loaded with meaning.
All the works look into, rather than at, a place — and through those places, the artists link those places’ histories to the histories of others. Some, like Katie Mitchell and Sari Braithwaite’s oblique artist’s documentary Qiuzhuang, think through changing conceptions of home. Robert McDougall’s essay film Rare Earth examines a tragic industrial history embedded in the landscape of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, while Sam Smith’s Lithic Coda considers how contemporary mining interacts with ancient geology on Gotland Island in Sweden. Made using family photography and images from her ancestral home of Bali, Leyla Stevens’ Scenes for Solace considers traditional modes of timekeeping and passage in a bordered era of restricted movement and lost time. Tiyan Baker explores becoming, belonging and bewilderment in the dense, horizonless jungles surrounding her ancestral village in colonised Borneo.
Featuring:
— Leyla Stevens, Scenes for Solace (2020, 8:30mins)
— Katie Mitchell and Sari Braithwaite, Qiuzhuang (2020, 15.50mins)
— Tiyan Baker, Tarun (2020, 15:36mins)
— Sam Smith, Lithic Coda (2020, 8.45mins)
— Robert McDougall, Rare Earth (2021, 31mins)
STRAY VOLTAGE is supported by the City of Melbourne 2022 Annual Arts Grants Program.