proof the act of seeing with one's own eyes
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| Image from The Amateurist by Miranda July |
Thursday 9 December 2004 - Sunday 13 February 2005
How do you know what you know?
As much an investigation as exhibition, Proof questions how consensus is formed. When our personal information is available for purchase online and when digital manipulation means that seeing has never been further from believing, how do we construct and deconstruct truth? How do you know what you know?
From weapons of mass destruction to children overboard, the testimony of vision is no small matter in contemporary politics. Taking Stan Brakhage's haunting dissection of mortality The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes as its point of departure, this exhibition questions how we negotiate reality through the moving image and confirms that evidence alone isn't proof.
Curated by Mike Stubbs
The Proof exhibition catalogue is now available, featuring critical essays and detailed information about all the works featured in the exhibition.
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Shot entirely in a Pittsbugh morgue, this work reveals Brakhage's lifelong preoccupation with the play of light while providing one of the most visceral contemplations of human mortality ever put to film.
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A miniature airplane armed with a micro-video camera enters the airspace over the landscape of the information age, stealing images from the Silicon Valley headquarters of Lockheed, Nasa Ames, Netscape, Xerox Parc and Hewlett Packard.
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Developed during Jem Cohen's residency at ACMI in 2000, this multi-screen installation travels through the malls, offices and car parks that make up the homogenized and ever-spreading global 'superlandscape'.
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Cause and effect is the subject of this absurd kinetic chain reaction triggered by fire, water, laws of gravity and chemistry, resulting in a riveting display of precision and probability.
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A televisually stunning, macabre and subversive meditation on pre-September 11 terroism and hijacking. dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y investigates the media politics within the imagination of disaster and the construction of history.
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With workplace surveillance cameras in every corner, Delores from 10 to 10 imagines what might have been recorded when Delfina Rodriguez, a maquiladora (factory assembly line) worker in Tijuana, Mexico, was abused and imprisoned by her manager.
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Faceless, nameless, petty crimes. the kind that don't even make the TV news. Over six hundred suburban criminal incidents are narrated from police records as the camera records the calm surface of streets and houses.
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Alerted to some harmless biological samples at artist Steve Kurtz's house, the FBI arrested him under suspicion of bioterrorism. He was eventually charged - with mail fraud. Evidence documents this absurd side effect of the 'war on terror'.
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Nizar Jabour, an Iraqi refugee now living in Australia, recently returned home after 17 years. His images of remembered people and places, including his family, community and their everyday life, contrasts with television coverage of the US invasion.
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Drawing on the artist's research in scientific acoustics, this immersive, robotic artwork tracks the movement of gallery visitors, surrounding them with sound and projected imagery.
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Eating, drinking and relaxing in the countryside with loved ones, archival footage of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Mao and Stalin narrated with details of their dietary, domestic and sexual habits makes for disturbingly human biographies.
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Produced prior to September 11, this activist/artist website identifies the location of closed-circuit television cameras in New York's city streets, enabling citizens to travel the "paths of least surveillance".
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An imposing Ikara missile, reconstructed in plywood and at actual size, is at the centre of a video installation that explores what we are supposed to fear as a nation and what we fear as individuals.
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Armed with cameras, are video activists gathering evidence or invading privacy? Obstruction combines footage from when efforts have been stopped - from a hand obstructing the lens to the violent force of threats and attacks.
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Redundant technology and commercial products, including the facial composite software that Hansen's company has developed, become a sculptural robot inspired by 1,001 statues of the Buddha at a Japanese temple.
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Crime scene photographs from the 1950s infiltrate present day footage of the city to show the past and present living and moving together, conjuring a place haunted by the persistent pulses of history.
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Elusive yet enduring, digital data propels the information age. sub_scapePROOF uses live and stored data with which the artists visualise and investigate the possibilities of time-based data flows.
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Two figures are caught in an off-kilter relationship based on a system of surveillance whose rules, boundaries and aim remain fascinatingly opaque. Who has the power, the watcher or watched?
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Eyes record the world around us and reveal the world within. As a series of people answer the question "what is your most significant memory?", we watch their eyes in extreme close up.
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Computer games, weapons testing, production line monitoring, marriage agency tapes - The Rumour of True Things etches the traces of our society using the transient images from the moving image ephemera of science, industry, commerce and medicine.
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This video-sculpture illustrates waves on the electromagnetic spectrum: the potentially dangerous atmospheric pollution emitted by everything from radio and television to hospital X-ray machines and gamma-ray security scanners.
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Historical fantasies generated from photographs, film fragments and memories are used as the starting points for discursive and imaginative 'fake documentaries' about the Lebanese civil war.
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Thursday 9 December 2004 - Sunday 13 February 2005
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