TRILOGIES

TRILOGIES brings together three major bodies of work produced over the past decade by Swedish (Berlin-based) artist Erik Bünger, Sydney (New York-based) duo Soda_Jerk and Melbourne-based Willoh S. Weiland (Aphids).

Curated by Will Foster, the three trilogies exist as video installations, audio works and live performances. Sampling popular culture and working at the intersection of music, performance and film, the artists delve into ideas around lived and recorded histories, science fiction and science fact, inner and outer space, and antique and current technologies.

As the Artistic Director of Aphids, Willoh S. Weiland has developed Space Trilogy (2008-2015), a series of projects that investigates the relationship between art and outer space. Forever Now, the final work from the trilogy, is a collection of artworks created to communicate to outer space. Contributed and collected from 118 different countries, Forever Now is intended as a sequel and an update to the visionary Voyager Records sent into space in 1977.

Willoh will reflect upon her trilogy of epic projects investigating the relationship between art and outer space in conversation with Dr Christopher Fluke from Swinburne University’s Department of AstroPhysics and Supercomputing. Willoh will present material from FOREVER NOW, a golden record for the 21st Century, compiled and designed by a cross-disciplinary team of artists and curators; VOID LOVE, an online soap opera about space; and YELLING AT STARS, Australia’s first intentional inter-stellar message transmitted deep into outer space.

Also, in the Trilogies exhibition, written on Tablets of Flesh (2007-13) by artist and composer Erik Bünger is trilogy of speculative essays revolving around the human voice and its contradictory relationship to the body, to language, to music and to technology.

Dark Matter (2005-2012) by Soda_Jerk is concerned with personal and historical experiences of time, and how these relations are mediated by screen technologies. Each work in the series takes the form of a séance fiction where encounters are staged between the past and future selves of a deceased screen star.

In response to the exhibition, the collective OtherFilm addresses the presence of the archive as both a source and subject of the three trilogies. Their response, Natural Selections; a resource room, engages the National Film and Sound Archive via an exploration of a set of 16mm film prints posed as “case studies”.

A suite of Learning and Public Programs will run alongside the exhibition, including lecture performances, presentations, gallery tours and workshops.

ERIK BÜNGER, SODA_JERK, WILLOH S. WEILAND (APHIDS) AND OTHERFILM
CURATED BY WILL FOSTER