ART+FILM: Fiona Macdonald, Museum Emotions

What happens when you take the language and tropes of soap opera and apply them to a contemporary art world?

Someone might be missing. Someone might be dead. And someone has it on tape.

Museum Emotions: A Conceptual Soap Opera in 9 Episodes (2003) is a video work set at the turn of the millennium within the institutional spaces, studios and bars of the contemporary art scene. Unfolding across nine loosely connected but stylistically different ‘episodes’, it follows a constellation of characters through the banalities of ambition, desire and cultural capital. Themes of reproduction, loss and cultural memory play out against the backdrop of increasingly absurd and poignant scenarios, referencing and distorting theoretical and pop cultural touchstones.

Museum Emotions animates the performative economies of the art world. Artists, critics and curators are performed by a cast of artists, critics and curators, their images refracted through the entanglements of generational angst, aesthetic fatigue and the residue of theory in a post-critical era. Where does the truth lie – in the artwork, the artist or the performance of both?

This event is presented in collaboration Bureaucracy of Feelings, an exhibition at Gertrude Contemporary curated by Diego Ramírez.

About Art+Film

ACMI's ART+FILM program showcases short and feature-length films by leading Australian and international artists. With a focus on single-channel works that harness the unique conventions of cinema, the program comprises internationally significant works from the ever-expanding field of artist films.

About Fiona Macdonald

Fiona Macdonald is an artist and filmmaker based in Melbourne/Naarm. Her practice is interested in refiguring artworks, histories, and discourses through the lens of queer and feminist thinking. Her film works have been screened at national and international film festivals and contemporary artspaces. Her exhibition practice spans performance, installation and video, and has been exhibited in Australia and internationally. She has a PHD in Fine Art and teaches in the Fine Art Department at Monash University. Her current work The Making Of… is a ficto-critical take on the documentary genre using the live event of the film shoot to explore the mechanics of representation.