THE NATIONAL: NEW AUSTRALIAN ART 2017
THE UNSETTLING – ATLANTA EKE AND GHENOA GELA

​

With RDYSTDY (Hana Miller and Jacob Perkins), Ghost Bird and Sezzo Snot

The Unsettling is a cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural collaboration between Melbourne-based choreographer Atlanta Eke and Sydney-based choreographer Ghenoa Gela, which draws on the niche genre of Horrorcore Hip Hop to explore the invisible violence of the colonial present. In looking at the question of whether a white Australian artist (Eke) and a Torres Strait Islander artist (Gela) can work outside the processes of appropriation and assimilation to co-author a new work, the artists have merged the cinematic with the choreographic, creating a supernatural horror film which acts as a trailer to a live performance that will take place in Track 8 at Carriageworks on Sunday 25 June 2017.

The performative element of The Unsettling comprises two live solo performances, separated spatially but presented simultaneously, as they meet on screen.  Samples of pre-recorded video material with live-feed video of each performance is combined and looped together with live musical accompaniment  – a supernatural horror film made in real time before the audience.  It proposes a fiction set in reality; an analysis of how fictions function philosophically and politically as an invention and/or as a temporal or spatial augmentation of the present.

 
ABOUT THE NATIONAL: NEW AUSTRALIAN ART 2017
A major exhibition partnership between three of Sydney’s premier cultural institutions, The National: New Australian Art is a six-year initiative presenting the latest ideas and forms in contemporary Australian art over three editions in 2017, 2019 and 2021.