ROSS GIBSON AND KATE RICHARDS
Sydney’s massive new exhibition site, CarriageWorks (aptly named given its former identity as the Eveleigh Railway Shops), is a sprawling post-Bauhausian site of industrial-styled buildings where, amongst other tenants, is to be found the new location of Performance Space—one of Sydney’s, and Australia’s, leading avant-garde multimedia and performance organisations. As a site, CarriageWorks reminds me of certain huge media festival sites that were (and are still) quite common in Europe, but particularly in Germany in the 1980s and 1990s.
Inside the cavernous colour-coded spaces of CarriageWorks, spaces not too dissimilar in design and size to those of the sets of an old Fritz Lang ‘UFA’ or a Marcel L’Herbier movie, we encounter in a dark auditorium space Ross Gibson and Kate Richards’ deftly designed and multifaceted five-channel interactive video installation Bystander. This refreshingly engaging and poetic work is part of the artists’ ongoing suite of multimedia projects called Life After Wartime, which in essence is an imaginative and thoughtful response to an archive of three thousand crime scene photographs from Sydney taken between 1945 and 1960.
Salient to Gibson and Richards’ sensual and kinaesthetic work, is the way these crime scene photographs are used in the installation’s overall conceptual and design architecture. What comes clearly to the foreground of one’s experience of Bystander is how these noirish photographs themselves—representing a ‘Weegee’ panorama of sorts—indicate the extent to which the past is embedded in the present. Indeed, this was for me one of the more appealing facets of this installation. Bystander is designed as a very user-centred work whose liquid photographic, textual and sonic architecture qualifies it as one of the more successful ‘ARC’ cross-institutional collaborative installations that I... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline