About

A selection of Prototype works, curated by Lauren Carroll Harris.

Place-making works that chime with the echoes with history, illuminate cultural traditions, and unfold against the backdrop of the Anthropocene. Landscapes – often politically charged through the effects of extraction, colonialism and industry – are explored as a function of time lost, time taken away, and time inherited. Linear ideas of progress and development become complicated; modernity and ancientness converge. Mountains and lakes are traversed as artists find evidence of long-ranging geological and cultural change; Earth-sized dilemmas play out within discrete ecosystems.

A new and different sun 2021

A sublime, abstract vision of renaissance clouds in Darug Country (western Sydney) invites reflections on love and grief, as Sydney artist Jodie Whalen apprehends light, slices the sky and brings celestial objects closer to Earth.

6 minutes | Ages 15+

Rare Earth 2021

Part essay film, part artist’s documentary, Robert McDougall looks at the imperatives of exploration and extraction in a journey to the industrial frontier zone of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, a vast hellscape where ‘rare earth’ minerals are mined with impunity to fuel global capital’s hunger for gadgets, devices and eco-consumerism.

30 minutes | Ages 15+

Merapi 2021

The drama, vitality and potential violence of Mount Merapi – one of the planet’s most active and deadly volcanoes, which, in Javanese tradition, houses the spirits of ancient ancestors – shudders and pulsates in Chilean artist-filmmaker Malena Szlam’s 16mm film.

7 minutes | Ages 15+

Picnic Places 2020

In this hybrid, scripted documentary, Canberran artist-filmmaker Robert Nugent imagines the discovery of strange architectural forms called “outback roadside picnic stands” by a mystified archaeologist, after some unnamed disaster renders the projects of colonialism and capitalism redundant in Oceania.

5 minutes | Ages 15+

Scenes for Solace 2020

A primer for sleep, a selection of atmospheric cuts from Australian-Balinese artist Leyla Stevens’s personal and family archive, and a reflection on passage, flight and timekeeping produced in lockdown in 2020. Shot between Jogjakarta (Java), Semarang (Java), Bali and Gadigal Land/Sydney.

8 minutes | Ages 15+