Time_Art_Impact Dialogue #9
Un-forgetting History
The Liminal Spaces of (Dis)Appearance in Kate McMillan’s Paradise Falls
Kate McMillan in dialogue with Wu Guanjun
15th January 2015
19:00
At MINSHENG ART MUSEUM, Shanghai
MOMENTUM Berlin and Minsheng Art Museum Shanghai are proud to present the collaborative project: Time_Art_Impact, a year-long education program of dialogues between media artists from the MOMENTUM Collection and key figures from the Shanghai art scene. Time_Art_Impact is the inaugural program of the new Media Library at Minsheng Art Museum, which will use the MOMENTUM Collection of international video art as a basis for a series of monthly cross-cultural dialogues via live-stream between Berlin, Shanghai and the rest of the world.
More information about the project here.
Read about the event on the MINSHENG ART MUSEUM web-site here.
ABOUT KATE MCMILLAN
CV – Website – Kate McMillan in MOMENTUM Collection
Kate McMillan has exhibited throughout Australia and overseas since 1997. In 2013 she relocated to London from Australia, where she has spent much of her life, to undertake a number of projects, which include the filming of four ambitious new works funded in part by one of two Creative Development Fellowships awarded annually across all artforms by the Department for Culture and the Arts, Western Australia. The work will be presented by Performance Space, Australia in Sydney, Tasmania and the United Kingdom in 2014 and will include a major monograph on McMillan’s practice. >McMillan is a Phd candidate at Curtin University under the supervision of Dr Anna Haebich (author of Broken Circles: Fragmenting Indigenous Families 1800-2000).[/one_half]
She has been funded by an Australian Postgraduate Award to complete her Phd which examines the forgetting of the history of Wadjemup/Rottnest Island. She currently holds an Academic Post with Open University, Australia. Previous solo exhibitions include Lost at the John Curtin Gallery in 2008, Broken Ground in 2006 at Margaret Moore Contemporary Art and Disaster Narratives at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts for the 2004 Perth International Arts Festival. She has been included in various group exhibitions over the last few years including at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Gertrude Street Contemporary Art in Melbourne, Govett Brewster Art Gallery in New Zealand and the Australian Centre for Photography in Sydney.
PARADISE FALLS I (2011/12)
Paradise Falls I is the philosophical culmination of the time McMillan spent in Switzerland in 2011 as well as her ongoing PhD project into the forgetting of the history of Wadjemup/Rottnest Island, Western Australia. This significant body of work highlights a shift in her practice, evidenced by a dark and moody palette and the combination of figurative and abstract works that set up an interplay between landscape, memory, forgetting and history. Working across a diverse range of mediums including painting, collage, photography, film and sculpture, this exhibition examines the complex and sustaining residue of these overarching themes.
The works cover a range of specific landscapes including Wadjemup/Rottnest Island, the Black Forest in Germany and the winter landscapes of Switzerland. With a focus on island sites and places that exist in isolation, the works attempt to draw parallels between physical landscapes and the psychological landscapes of the artist’s own memories, broader cultural histories and stories.
PARADISE FALLS II (2011/12)
Paradise Falls II follows a man as he rows towards the silhouette of a craggy island off the coast of Wadjemup/Rottnest. He too appears and disappears from sight, finally lost to the inky black of the ocean. These characters are stand-ins for fractured and partial histories that disappear from focus, yet continue in our collective psyche as dark and haunting traumas. The films are like moving paintings, heavily referencing the romantic tradition of Germanic landscape painting. Unsurprisingly then the work of artists such as Arnold Bocklin (1827-1901) and Casper David Friedrich (1774-1840) become distant cousins to McMillan’s oeuvre.
The artist acknowledges and even embraces these quotations but she also holds them in a critical eye as part of an enlightenment ideology that has helped us to forget. Through engaging with the viewing process we participate in a re-remembering, acknowledging the shady edges of things, but also baring witness to the beauty of sadness that is contrary to the horrors of forgetting history.
ABOUT WU GUANJUN
Guanjun Wu is Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Politics at East China Normal University (ECNU), Shanghai, China. He also serves as Vice President of Department’s Academic Board and Executive Editor-in-Chief of ECNU Review. He is the author of a number of books including The Great Dragon Fantasy (2014), The Eleventh Thesis (2014), The Philosophy of Living Together (2011), The Hauntology of Love and Death (2008), The Perverse Core of Reality (2006), and Multiple Modernities (2002).
Read about the event on MOMENTUM web-site.
