On Runa Islam @ MCA

There's something comforting throughout the MCA's small but stunning Runa Islam retrospective, the analogue flicker of 16mm film, the gentle hum of spindle and the clatter of sprockets creates a welcoming soundtrack. The retro technology has a qualitative effect on all of the film pieces on show, there's a warmth and an intimacy in the medium that reflects much of the subject matter. The first couple of works one comes across borrow heavily from the past. One might be an Andy Warhol screentest, another takes the cold light of Fassbinder and the slow deliberate pans of Antonioni, together this seems like a visit to the past. However as you watch and spend time in and with these works you feel something very different. The icy nihilism of Warhol is nowhere to be found nor is the dispassionate dialectic of the modernist filmmakers, this work feels much more tangible and sympathetic but no less intellectually rigorous. In fact 'Assault', Islam's version of the Warhol 'Screen Tests' breaks down the cold modernist stare by involving and implicating the viewer. Here a young androgyne man is filmed having light shone through coloured gels directly into his eyes. To see the piece properly we have to stand in front of the translucent screen it's projected on, this when the light is at its strongest and the subject squints so does the viewer. It's tricksy and not entirely successful but it shows something that makes Islam interesting, she privileges the senses over the intellectual. This makes her far more affecting than any number media theorists and it gives the work depth and intrigue.

The most ambitious work here 'Scale 1/16 inch = 1 foot' hints at narrative as it focusses on reality and representation. In it a concrete multi-storey car park sits above a non-descript town like a spaceship landed. The film explores the car park and issues arising. The mildewed concrete of a Sixties municipal edifice are contrasted with the brilliant orange of chairs in a restaurant, and immediately a space is created between the idea of town planner's utopia and urban decay. The camera takes on a dispassionate and clinical role as it surveys the building, it is geometrically gorgeous but sits oddly amongst Victorian terraces and whilst this isn't a rant against brutalist architecture it is nonetheless unsettling. The name of the film can be pinned down to format and subject, Two interlinked reels are projected, on on to a small screen hanging in front of a much larger one. At times the images interact, most obviously when one screen has the camera moving around the exterior of the car-park and on the other the same movement is played out on an architect's scale model. The whole film gives a sense of dislocation, between people and their environment, between intention and result and between aesthetics and lived reality. It rewards viewing and is much more satisfying than its tricksy conceit might suggest.

'The House Belongs To Those Who Inhabit It' simply explores a derelict warehouse. A projection onto a suspended screen hangs in front of a dark wall but also seems to cut through it. A camera with a narrow field of vision, giving no sense of anything peripheral simply scans its surroundings, up and down and panning along. The movement and the blinkered field is unsettling, the whole picture refuses to reveal itself and as the camera moves around it takes on an urgent personality. we can imagine our surroundings but we will only believe our eyes. The screen becomes our aperture into another world from which we have been separated and in doing so it makes us much more conscious and appreciative of its details. In fact this is a familiar theme across the works here, Islam is concerned with the particularity of the senses, of their capacity to comfort or confuse us.

The heightened sensory property of film is again explored in 'Be the first to see what you see as you see it'. It looks like Fassbinder but feels like Hitchcock. In its almost narrative a girl in a china showroom lifts, rocks and spins pieces of porcelain. Watching her as coffee pots wobble is like waiting for a bomb to explode in a thriller. Islam doesn't just rely on the implicit fragility of china as symbol but layers on a brittle naturalistic soundtrack and has the protagonist touch the fragile crockery in extreme close up. What Islam manages to do is contrast experience with imagination, the whole film is a tease, we expect something to smash soon but it is always simply concentrating on the physicality of the object. The effect is at once hypnotic and thought provoking.

Runa Islam is a film buff's delight. She takes on Tarkovsky's 'Stalker', almost everything by Antonioni and the saturated directness of Fassbinder. This magpie borrowing makes it easy to see the works here as small essays on film history and the properties of a medium. It seems to me this is a lazy and narrow reading of what she does as despite these elements the films are far more emotional and visceral than conceptual. What Islam does is use the properties of film, when stripped of the demands of narrative, to explore how we experience our surroundings whether mediated by film or not. This makes the films curious and ruminative, they challenge us through our senses rather than through contrived visual oxymorons. The fact that these films have such a physical presence and effect is testimony that this is much more than 'art as lecture'. Runa Islam is asking us to consider how we see the world rather than how we see film, that's a far more righteous challenge.

On Fiona Tan @ Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation and National Art School Gallery

I'm still thinking about 'Coming Home', Fiona Tan's show of two video works spread between Paddington's admirable Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation and the charming gallery of the National Art School (where you can also take in a spot of Norman McLaren if you fancy). I imagine I'll feel like this for some time these twin meditations on Orientalism, history and our subconscious take such a profound and subtle look at a cultural and psychological condition that they already feel like that rare thing, a parallel critique of feelings and thoughts.

The two works, 'A Lapse of Memory' and 'Disorient' are big, almost cinematic, affairs with high production values, most notably a poetic sense of editing and a sound design that is integral to meaning. They are connected thematically, both deal with memory and place and are to greater or lesser extent concerned with orientalism and the psyche of the traveller.

'Disorient', the work at Sherman, is composed of projections onto two large screens facing one an other running out of synch in a continuous loop. At one end of the room is what looks like a travelogue through Asia with handheld video and newsreel footage. Over this is a calm measured English voice reads from Marco Polo's journals, a flat factual narrative where he describes the social characteristics, trade, religion and character of each of the people's he encounters. For the most part this avoids the picturesque clichés of the Orient. So whilst geishas and temples are eschewed the camera might shakily pan around an empty factory or through street traffic giving an equal weight to each. The more familiar images that break through are Chinese troops charging Tibetan demonstrators or the inevitable and timeless armed convoys in Afghanistan.

This is done in a less heavy handed way than it might sound from that description even though the images always provide a light counterpoint to the Venetian explorer's text. It serves to remind us of the mutability of our pre-conceptions about distant cultures, the inevitably selective imagery we encounter can replace one myth with another as easily as it can reinforce the ancient. As Polo, and the viewer, moves from place to place we see the anonymous cloud banks outside every airliner's window. Marco Polo was a merchant before he ever became a chronicler of the East and we ought to remember this as we see him characterise each country by its industry and trading habits, the news footage shows that now we are as likely to be conditioned by a foreign correspondent and their cameras, thus the world changes with the lens through which it is seen. Tan creates or presents some gorgeous individual images, a blue dyed dog skulking thorugh an indigo factory, a young man with a bicycle kneeling on a broken concrete slab as he prays in the Iraqui twilight and the sight of a whole car body carried atop a camel on a mountain pass might be forever memorable.

The travelogue screen might be the visible, the external version of our engagement with Asia, but facing it is a slow luscious film that can only represent the recesses of our minds. In deep reds and blacks this projection is a slow close up tour of the shelves and corridors of what at first seems an oriental junk shop. Everything is here, Buddhas, birdcages, masks, dragons, elephants, clouds of silk and spice. The confusion of culture and category in this cabinet of wonders feels intentional, it presents an Orient of otherness, of familiar versions of the exotic. Each of the objects and artefacts here represent something bigger, a broader looser vision of the inscrutable strangeness of the East. This is made all the stranger by an unexplained man who appears in what might be the saffron robes of a monk, he seems like a keeper, of a shop or of memories but you suspect that we have only seen a little of his domain and that the shelves are a tiny part of some Borgesian labyrinth. Tan is accomplished in her medium and much more than a creator of tableaux, the pacing of the smooth camera moves and the subtlety of the edit creates an ethereal feel. There is the layered shimmer of lacquer here, the light of consciousness is being reflected and captured constantly so that you can almost see our own assumptions and beliefs about the Orient in each object.

When one looks between the two screens it is clear how much more vivid and detailed the inner imaginary world of symbols and signs is than the messy, shaky reality of the travelogue. On its own this would be a glib observation (but plenty of works have been created on single insights far less profound than this) but the density of the veneered layers of image and idea make 'Disorient' a beautifully puzzling work.

No less beautiful, but perhaps less complex, is the second work, 'A Lapse of Memory'. This is an almost narrative piece that follows a curious old man around a rococo oriental place (which turns out to be the Royal Pavillion in Brighton, England). We learn the man's name is Henry and that he once travelled and may or may not be Asian. The film mostly observes the ritual;s of his day as he scuttles through the extravagantly colourful, but peeling and shabby, Chinoiserie of the building. He too might be a keeper, but this time of something lost, of an absence. We are told that "Henry is waiting for a story he can make his home" and what we hear about are fragments of arrivals, departures and voyages. Henry's memory palace is made to feel afloat and adrift by the sound of ocean borne gulls on the soundtrack and that sense of dislocation is pervasive.

Again Tan combines a beautiful technique, notably here the sound design, with individual images of pervasive beauty. A sequence where Henry lays and gathers lengths of inspection lamps in a long corridor is breathtaking and the frames where he lays himself to sleep beneath an umbrella feels unexplainably poignant. My sole reservation is with the voice over. The knowing self referentiality of reading the shooting script is irritating and the only occasionally poetic non-sequitirs of the script tend toward the pretentious. It's a difficult line to follow, the images Tan creates are pregnant with possibility, light of touch and confident. Prose is oddly far more concrete, it exists to describe the specific and negates some of that wonder Henry's story, or stories, or the story which he seeks, is held in his rituals and his traverses of the rooms not in the narration but it also comes from what we might imagine that story could be, after all it not only Henry who is searching for a narrative.

These works are far more interesting than their PR descriptions. All too often the press releases and verbiage that surround shows don't do them justice, they obfuscate or attempt to connect with art touchstones rather than describe an experience. I think that this is the case with Tan's work here. It doesn't matter that one work was made for Venice and that subsequently it can be seen as an essay on that serene republic's pivotal role in east/west trade, nor does the identity of Henry's home, the Regency chinoise Brighton Pavillion. It's not uninteresting but it presents the viewer with a terribly limited lens and to come at works such as these with a pre-conceived idea of meaning is a great shame, they hold so much more than these locational puns. Tan's work is a gorgeous, serious and thoughtful meditation on memory and identity. It is powerful because as it deals with those subjects it doesn't reduce them to badges and positions or a précis of Edward Said, but instead captures the fragility of consciousness and the shifting sands of identity through time. These two pieces are small wonders and we are lucky that they are on show until June.

On Sylvie Blocher @ MCA

Sydney's MCA is a having a good 2010. Almost overlooked on the fourth floor, a detour away from the excellent Olafur Eliason show, is Sylvie Blocher's 'Living Pictures' a group of simple large scale video works that you must see if you care about art and people. The show has, in the late summer cacophony of festivals and events, been very quietly promoted, which made its discovery all the more pleasurable, for this is assertive and essential contemporary art that proves to be acute and intimate.

'Living Pictures' is a series of something like speaking video portraits where, predominantly, a single person occupies the screen at any given time. They are encouraged to speak, sing or write about a particular subject that might be 'slavery', 'money' or 'beauty'. Blocher records the results, shooting the people against highly artificial high colour backdrops, and intercuts them, some pieces are close to an hour in length.It's perhaps because that conceit sounds so mundane that the results are so extraordinary. The idea that is the genesis of each of the works in this series (some of which have been commissioned with the patron choosing a theme) is an idea that is essentially human, 'What does ecstasy look like?', 'What does slavery mean?' or 'What is it like to feel a lack?' What ensues are 'conceptual' works in the sense they explore certain abstract concepts rather than being concerned with art as a concept in itself. The germinal idea in each, and the human tendency to gravitate to the felt and experienced, means that even within each film there can be a massive range of response, which in itself presents us with human depth and variety.

The first piece we see doesn't bode well, a half naked French guitarist, who has been painted partially brown, singing the words to a Barack Obama speech in an ecstatic falsetto. It's one of those works that requires you to be in on a certain part of the joke to get it, Thus when the next piece, entitled 'What Belongs To Them', is introduced as an exploration of the idea of slavery made in New York some time between 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq we have every right to shudder. Instead we find a room with something tender and raw as men and women recount their stories or act out their obsessions in front of a vast American flag. A man recounts the story (in high storytelling mode) of shooting his first deer, another struggles to tell the story of murder on a relations plantation in pre-emancipation Louisiana and one woman simply dances with joy to what sounds like The Last Poets. What you get here is America through the lens of its original sin, the twists and evasions and confrontations it pushes people to. There are tales of every day slavery here but even in the hurt and confused or the needy and paranoid there is clear sense of bondage to the need to tell. It's easy, and I don't doubt popular, to see this as work about big abstractions like race and gender. However you don't feel the didacticism of identity politics art here instead there's something far more direct and tangible that's far less comfortable than theory.

Sylvie Blocher expo l'Inde dans tous les sens
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That sense of the messy blur of reality of even borne out by the way sound bleeds from room to room and piece to piece. Initially irritating it gives the sense of being in an endless urgent global conversation. Blocher's outlook is global, truly and sincerely, she seems drawn to the sense of displacement felt by migrants, the search for identity and dignity and the immediacy of experience that is lost in either touristic or theoretical snapshots of globalisation. Her filming of the private ecstasy of Indian men, whose faces loom large on the screens, tightly cut to give us a complete sense of separation from stimulus, is warm and close in a way that feels almost intrusive.

Another painfully honest piece is 'Nanling' a piece in which Blocher appears with an elderly Chinese lady who has never met a white woman before. Even now I'm unsure of the totality of my response. The pair sit on a sofa and touch one another: childlike, apelike, sexual, innocent, disturbing, comforting. There is clearly much unspoken, perhaps even unthought and only just felt but that unknown and unknowable subtext makes the work trembingly good. This may be an old refrain on this blog but works that capture our need for contact will always shine whatever the medium or context.

There appears to be nothing that Blocher isn't interested in, nothing that her cool eyed camera is not willing to explore at face value. Her work with the residents of French Housing project, "Je & Nous" at first reminded me of Gillian Wearing's "Signs that Say What You Want Them to Say and Not Signs that Say What Someone Else Wants You to Say", but the gentleness of the transitions, the faces given to faceless people as they appear in T-Shirts with statements they had written about self and beauty moves it somewhere else. This is less about the irony that can be pulled from between our inner and outer lives as voiceless invisible immigrants and working class people give access to words and an audience. It is gently moving in the best possible way.

Her work with the residents of Penrith in Sydney's outer Western suburbs, 'What's Missing' is no less extraordinary, and on reflection may be just as exotic as China or India for many viewers. The piece is formally different as each interviewee is duplicated on screen, next to their own image, listening, singing or simply trying to put their best face forward. Each person stands in front of a camouflage backdrop, odd because the last thing these people do is hide, they are in plain view and plainly vulnerable. One woman asks "Why does this country have this big hole in its heart?" and whilst she might be talking about the red desert we can't help think that the piece is about people negotiating their way around that hole, living on the edge of a city. There is damage here and battler optimism, the gap between words and expressions is often poignant. This may look like a social commentary but in tone and mood it has a strangely spiritual dimension, the 'lack' that is spoken of in a card on the wall might be something far more universal than that of the residents of Penrith.

I've rarely spent time in an exhibition and been so determined to go back even before I left. Sylvie Blocher has an incredible lightness of touch and heaviness of purpose that make these works so powerful. Inevitably they transcend any of the bumf and explanation that surrounds them, they feel private and breathtaking, so personal that one feels it is a privilege to share time with their protagonists.

On Rising Tide @ MCA

Walking back out into the Saturday chaos of Circular Quay after seeing the MCA's Rising Tide, a selection of Australian video works from the permanent collection my other half and I discussed what we'd found most interesting. Our opinions were pretty near identical, and then she said "you know, there's just something really boring that happens when you give blokes a video camera". Here at least she's right. The stand-out works in the show are all by Australian women. Four at least are confident, thoughtful, clever and often moving, by contrast the men deliver pieces that are in turns glib, dim and unjustifiably pleased with themselves.

In creating pieces of disturbing beauty and tenderness Patricia Piccinini is second to none amongst Australian's working today. Here science fiction fusions of man, animal and machine allow her to make consider fundamental questions about our own place in the world. 'Sandman' (extended excerpts can be seen on her website HERE), her work here, is no exception. A twenty minute loop of video sees a woman, dressed in white, adrift on a swelling ocean. The camera bobs, almost floating alongside her as she swims inexpertly and stops, there is no shore, nothing to orientate oneself or swim to. From time to time she submerges, or allows herself to sink, and the camera follows her, and we slowly realise that she is happy underwater. Calmer as she sinks in to the amniotic fluid of the ocean we also notice that the lines on her neck might be gills. The extraordinary feature of Piccinini's work is that these fantasy elements never detract from the essentially human conditions she explores, 'Sandman' never becomes an essay on amphibians. Rather it explores our sense of comfort and acceptance, of dislocation and relief and does prove to have hidden depths.

In a room nearby Jess MacNeil's two pieces are gentle optical tricks that encourage us to meditate on our own place in time and space. In 'The Shape of Between' four shallow hulled rafts float on the Ganges, they disturb the water, or their occupants do with oars or poles. Despite all apparent effort they go nowhere, their relationship to one another changes very little although they may turn or rotate. The effect, delivered in the low contrast washed out colours of a watery dawn that might almost be the surface of a porcelain glaze is softly hallucinatory. Perhaps like a circle of Hindu incarnation their places are fixed, or maybe they are fortunate enough to suspend a perfect moment. The delicate stasis has a spiritual meditative aspect and soon the movement we expect has become redundant. Along the adjoining wall is a fixed projection of the steps of the Sydney Opera House, across the faces of which flicker slices of the shadows of passer by. The hint of presence in the trickles of shadow is extremely affecting. The steps might be a megalithic monument, we lap over them like time and leave barely a trace. In both of these pieces we get to ponder impermanence consider how we pass through the world and the marks we make.

Susan Norrie's five screen projection, 'Passenger' does little more than hint atmospherically but is no less powerful for that. Each screen shows a different non-narrative. A black and white rendering of what looks like tourist home movies or found documentary footage (but are actually shot for the piece). Our urge toward narrative helps fill the gaps in-between and we arrive at something that might be a human made apocalypse. Norrie's work can't help but remind you of Chris Marker or Andrei Tarkovsky's post apocalyptic landscapes. The figures masked in full bio-hazard suits cannot help but give the sense that something sinister is happening, we feel potential contagion is possible. Simply through intimation Norrie has created something as gripping as thriller.

If only for poe-faced need of their desperation to shock the Kingpins take the biscuit. Their ersatz superhero/joggers performing co-ordinated routines in a selection of Sydney's Starbucks are intended to subvert something or other, perhaps an idea of cultural homegeneity. The work is a shopping list of the tired and familiar counter cultural ironic appropriations. Of course the inescapable problem here is the sheer banality of the insight, neither Starbucks or the Seventies Aussie male (signified as ever by blonde moustache and mullet wig) are original subjects or devices. The funniest thing to watch is just how unshocked the punters, who are of course targets as well as observers in the Kingpin's somewhat confused anti-consumerist happening, in and around each café are by all this. They're staples of satiric parody and subsequently this has all the earnest humour and hackneyed insight of a Year Ten project.

The idea that certain works are of interest or value thanks to their transgressive properties might be the single most problematic notion in art. Unsurprisingly it's where the boys fall over most predictably too. TV Moore's Ned Kelly pastiches were probably more fun to make than watch whilst Todd McMillan's pointless time-lapse marathon is even accompanied by the probably unintentionally hilarious text "McMillan filmed himself for twelve hours—from dusk to dawn—facing towards the bleak ocean in search of enlightenment. However, in the end nothing was achieved; ultimately introspection and self reflection did not bring any answers or renewed wisdom". The problem is that artists appear to have a really very low threshold for what is actually startling. Placing video screens of a series of visual clichés on the floor and then surrounding them with crap isn't 'challenging' as Daniel Von Sturmer says, it's just silly. Much the same goes for Tony Schwensen's videos of himself making faces which have such a tenuous link to the claims of political commentary and social satire that are made in the accompanying blurb that they almost seem unnecessary. Opacity is not the same as challenge or profundity. The formal non-sequiturs and leaden ironies of some of these pieces exist only in the theoretical verbiage of the artist's statement. To claim shock value is of course a 'get out of jail free' card, it virtually denies the possibility of criticism which would, supposedly, validate the work. That of course is pure sophistry, these pieces aren't shocking they're just comically self-important. Shaun Gladwell's 'Tangara' does manage to at least be beautiful, although more out of urban gymnastic curiosity than anything else, but again I was left feeling that there was much less than met the eye to his work.

Kate Murphy's incredible piece 'Prayer of a Mother' is one of the most affecting video installations I have seen. Twice now , with a couple of years in between, I've sat through it and been moved to tears (that might have something to do with my own Irish mother). In the middle of a simple set up of five adjacent video screens a mother, whose fingers worry away at her rosary, details her habitual prayers for her family along with her hopes and fears for them. On either side, in medium close up and deep shadow, so only their faces shine bright a revolving cast of eight siblings listen, laugh, tease and cry. It's an extraordinary work made compelling as each of the, mostly adult, children reveal personalities and positions brought out by their response to their mother's mantra. Mum wishes them all the gift of faith and in a sense that's what we bestowed. The darkness that surrounds each cannot isolate them, their family resemblance and the love of their mother is a chain that links them all. This is, foremost a piece about the human face and is easily the equal to any of Bill Viola's studies of that (and, as much as I love Viola's work, it is far superior to some of the actorly mugging in 'The Passions'). That at any given time the sons and daughters can respond in such different ways not only intrigues us but also marks out the complexity and nuance of human emotion itself, only in fiction do we feel things in a single way.

The highlights of 'Rising Tide' are very good indeed, even if the boys seem determined to show off to the grown-ups rather too much. There is far too much talk of irony in the showy high concept pieces (and often they are no such thing) when the real irony here is that the opaque and theory heavy works come accompanied by such specific explanations that they take on specific and narrow meanings which stops them being very interesting. By contrast pieces like Piccinini's, MacNeil's, Murphy's and Norrie's need no explanation and yet can sustain and encourage a range of response and interpretation, making them both fascinating and powerful.