Page 37 - Annual Review 2008

REwARdS / 37
Modern Ruin
(12 July – 12 October 2008, Australian Cinémathèque
and Media Gallery, GoMA, exhibition and film program)
‘Modern Ruin’ brought together artists and filmmakers
who revaluate the utopian dreams and forms of the
modern period, looking back to modern art, architecture
and design to explore their historical failures, respond to
their particular aesthetic qualities, and express a sense of
loss. This return to Modernism’s purified forms represents
an attempt to imagine new meanings for them.
The exhibition featured film, video and installation by
many artists exhibiting for the first time in Australia,
including: Chris Cornish, Andreas Fogarasi, Ann
Lislegaard, Ursula Mayer, Laurent Montaron, Daimantus
Narkevicius and Anri Sala.
Pierre Bismuth: Coming Soon
(20 March – 22 June 2008, Media Gallery, GoMA)
French artist Pierre Bismuth is renowned for his
mischievous responses to cinema and the print
media. Bismuth’s exhibition at GoMA, his first in
Australia, focused on a group of video works that
humorously deconstructed the conventions of feature
film. Complementing the exhibition were Australian
Cinémathèque screenings of Eternal Sunshine of
the Spotless Mind 2004, for which Bismuth won an
Academy Award as co-author, and Michelangelo
Antonioni’s The Passenger 1975.
The Leisure Class
(13 October 2007 – 2 March 2008, Australian
Cinémathèque and Media Gallery, GoMA, exhibition
and film program)
Conspicuous leisure, conspicuous consumption,
conspicuous waste; this exhibition and film program
drew its name from economist Thorstein Veblen’s
celebrated monograph The Theory of the Leisure
Class 1899. The exhibition included film, video and
installation works by artists who respond strongly to the
contemporary packaging of leisure, consumption and
lifestyle as markers of identity.
The screening program included films by Michelangelo
Antonioni, Guy Debord, Marc'O, Rosalind Nashashibi
and Jacques Tati.
Left: Opening of the ‘Premier of Queensland’s National New Media Art Award’, October 2008.
Photograph: Ray Fulton
Above: Aernout Mik / Pulverous (video still) 2003 / Purchased 2005. The Queensland
Government's Gallery of Modern Art Acquisitions Fund / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery