DEBUT XIX ONLINE

DEBUT XIX

An annual curated exhibition of works by recent graduates from Melbourne’s major art institutions. Celebrating its nineteenth year, DEBUT is a Blindside project committed to fostering new talent.

Online Artists: Ming Liew, Katie Paine, Michelle Tonkin.

Gallery Artists: Ramak Bamzar, Devika Bilimoria, Christy Chudosnik, Hugh Crowley, Jordan Koudmani, WooJai Lee, Katie Paine.

Curators: Priya Namana & Nina Sanadze.

Ming Liew

How Will I Remember, 2022. Digital video, 1920 x 1080 pixels, 33 min. Courtesy the artist.

How Will I Remember is an essay video exploring my Chinese-Australian bi-cultural identity in relation to loss, grief and image-making. It's based on my lived experience as a first-generation Chinese immigrant, depicting fragments of my memory as I detach from my ethnic past and embrace my Australian future. Through the contested and conflicted diptych moving images and bilingual voiceover, this film renders a faltered narrative that oscillates between fact and fiction, past and present, personal and social. It examines the hidden associations between image-making and identity formation, to cultivate new insights into the migrant experience in contemporary Australia.

Katie Paine

The components of A Lonely Circumnavigation function as a choral round. When viewing, please press play on the video and then press play on the soundtrack, they are made to revolve around one another regardless of the sequence in which they are played.

Transmission Maquette [For A Lonely Circumnavigation]. 2023. Artist-made ply receptacle, enamel, hook, PVC, Blindside gallery headphones, valve, audio soundtrack for video A Lonely Circumnavigation. Duration Image 12.30min. Sound 13:57min.

The components of A Lonely Circumnavigation function as a choral round. When viewing, please press play on the video and then press play on the soundtrack, they are made to revolve around one another regardless of the sequence in which they are played.

A Lonely Circumnavigation is a video installation which tells the story of an indeterminate fictional realm called The Doldrums: a lonely, empty place of temporal stasis. Here a grieving protagonist haunts the residents of a hospital. Isolated and completely cut off from the world, gradually they become preoccupied with observing the gargantuan hospital complex that can be seen outside their window: dreaming of the lives of the hospital residents, imagining they can correspond with them. The protagonist becomes compulsive in their observations, watching over the building like a deranged sentinel with no clear purpose. Like a phantasm that never reveals visible form or a spectre who witnesses the actions of the unwitting living, the hospital residents never become aware of this ongoing act of haunting. The video explores ideas of spectral communication, melancholia and the slippery nature of memory.

A Lonely Circumnavigation comprises footage mainly filmed from apartment windows overlooking the Austin Hospital and close-up views of the hospital edifice. The video is predominantly filmed at night when vision is limited. The video is filmed in Raw File format to mimic the eye’s struggle to see in the absence of light – the world is shrouded by night and vision becomes treacherous. The film was captured using no additional light sources. This made for a complex filming process: with a small viewfinder that was dark and completely desaturated. It was almost impossible filming in the darkness to make sense of any images or footage within the viewfinder and therefore sight was not able to be a tool for reference to assist with filming. Due to the Raw File format, the site footage took on the form of a black impenetrable expanse; intelligible images were excavated colour-correcting and editing tools. In this sense, footage was captured blind. Unable to ascertain camera angles, lighting or subject, the act of filming became an act of divination or a hauntological act; footage had to be retrospectively sorted through, navigated, edited and translated.

This body of work comprises segments of Paine’s Masters’ research titled A Spectral Congregation.

Michelle Tonkin

Formless Intimacies, 2022. HD video (16:9), sound, 5:38min.

Using performance, video and sound, Michelle Tonkin’s work, Formless Intimacies is an exploration of intimate encounters between the membrane of the body and the porous boundary of objects. Imagining ritualised spaces through a performative intent, the artist uses the mediums of air, of breath and of space to inflate a seeming absence into a resonant presence.  In this way, an ordinary object such as a garbage bag, transforms into an object of wonder.

Sculpting intent in this way, each breath that is taken becomes an agent in healing the space between the body and the world, self and other.

This is a single channel edit of Tonkin’s Masters of Contemporary Art 2022 VCA Grad Show installation which was originally displayed as a 5 channel video with 2.2 channel sound. The inflatable object in the video is made of repurposed garbage bags. It was conceived and constructed by Romanie Harper and first used in a stage production of Hercules (2022) by the Daniel Schlusser Ensemble.  The videography of the performance is by Grace Dephoff.