Samstag's Spring season showcases three moving image installations that explore the complex relationship between fiction and documentary and offer an insight into history, imagination and storytelling.
Samstag’s 2021 Spring Season brings together three major moving image installations that rest on the tension between fact and fiction.
The selected works represent a particular nexus of film and art, where documentary, genre, storytelling and concepts of space come into focus. In Samstag’s ground floor gallery, Pilar Mata Dupont’s The Ague draws upon the scientific world of London’s Kew Gardens to tease out the irrationality, truths and misinformation that permeate our colonial history and ecological future.
Upstairs, the Karrabing Film Collective’s Night Time Go begins by hewing closely to the historical details of the disenfranchisement of Indigenous peoples before slowly morphing into an alternative history in which drama, humour and satire turn the tables on the powerful. Shot on Country and in community, it is a work that represents truly innovative, collaborative film-making.
Lastly, Israeli-born, Berlin-based Omer Fast’s Continuity tells a disturbing tale of a middle-class couple who engage a succession of actors to play the part of their son, a young soldier supposedly returned from Afghanistan. A fiction with the air of authenticity, Fast’s work is a reminder that the work of a filmmaker can deceive as effectively as it can reveal.
PILAR MATA DUPONT: THE AGUE /
Friday 22 October — Friday 3 December 2021
Pilar Mata Dupont’s screen-based work The Ague (2018), focuses on Kew Gardens, the Royal Botanic Gardens, London which houses the world’s largest seed bank, conserving the most endangered wild plants for future use.
Theatrical and intriguing, The Ague transports us into this botanical world through a case study of the Cinchona tree and an adaption of a Virginia Woolf story in which scientific claims acquire increasingly irrational traits, where truths and misinformation, colonial histories, and our ecological future coalesce.
Pilar Mata Dupont is a Latinx visual artist and filmmaker living and working between Rotterdam, Netherlands, and Boorloo (Perth), Australia. This is the Australian premiere of The Ague.
KARRABING FILM COLLECTIVE: NIGHT TIME GO /
Friday 22 October — Friday 3 December 2021
Karrabing Film Collective’s single-channel work Night Time Go (2017) is an feature length exploration of the settler state’s attempt to remove Indigenous people from their lands during the Second World War.
Combining drama and humour and using doctored archival footage overlaid with a quasi-British Pathé voiceover, the work fearlessly imagines an alternative history of the Belyuen community.
Karrabing Film Collective from the Northern Territory consists of over 50 members, all but one are Indigenous, and range in age from new-born to elder.
OMER FAST: CONTINUITY /
Friday 22 October — Friday 3 December 2021
Omer Fast’s surreal video installation Continuity (2012) uses repetition, re-enactment and multiple takes of a given scene, as a way of offering an insight to loss and mourning.
What initially appears as a conventional scenario – a middle-class married couple welcome the return of their son from Afghanistan – is upended through Continuity’s deliberate blurring of boundaries between documentary, dramatization, and fantasy as it shifts between perspectives and cinematic conventions to achieve what Fast describes as a state of ‘productive confusion.’
Omer Fast is an Israeli born artist based in Berlin, Germany.
