Exhibition by Young Australian Artists
It is the 1970s in the Bronx; people are swing dancing in Chicago clubs and in the streets; the pioneers of old school hip-hop DJ Kool Herc, Afrika Baambattaa and Grandmaster Flash have been abducted by aliens and are now on board a spaceship with Sun Ra and George Clinton en route to Planet Rock, secretly developing a new kind of music. All the while voiceovers from Ronald Reagan and Morgan Freeman narrate; scenes from ‘Star Wars’, ‘Independence Day’ and ‘I Dream of Genie’ intersect with our hip-hop DJs; and beats from The Chemical Brothers, Herbie Hancock and Public Enemy play in the background. Hip-hop turntablism (a mixture of old school hip-hop and intergalactic ‘scratch’ rhythms) is about to be unleashed via PETV on Earth.
Astro Black: A History of Hip-Hop (Episode 0-2) (2007-08) remixes samples of pop culture videos and audio bytes to create fictitious histories that interrogate the theory of Afro-Futurism and the history of hip-hop. Created by the collaborative culture-jamming duo, Dominique and Dan Angeloro AKA Soda_Jerk, this three channel video projection is witty, technically proficient and conceptually rigorous. This is Soda_Jerk at their time traveling best; mocking piracy, challenging notions of authorship and remixing cultural history, all done with panache and a quirky sense of humour. Astro Black: A History of Hip-Hop is one of the highlights of ‘Primavera 2008’ at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney.
Curated by Hannah Matthews, ‘Primavera’ has no overarching curatorial premise or conceptual theme. Matthews has chosen to employ an intuitive approach to selecting thirteen disparate artists, amongst them three collaborative duos, who have a dedicated approach to their practice and are at a time in their careers when they