Ben Apfelbaum

MCA AUSTRALIA : ULTRA UNREAL : NEW MYTHS FOR NEW WORLDS

 

Lu Yang – Dokusho Dokushi
Club Ate
Saeborg
Saeborg – Slaughterhouse
Justin Shoulder of Club Ate
Saeborg Pootopia
Lawrence Lek – Geomancer
Lawrence Lek – Geomancer
Lawrence Lek – Geomancer
Saeborg
Korakrit Arunanondchai & Alex Grojic – A room filled with people with funny names

An unreal new exhibition  ULTRA UNREAL has just opened at the Museum Of Contemporary Art (MCA).

The exhibition features the works of six artists and collectives whose world building practices are connected to nightlife ecosystems across the globe. Club Ate (Sydney), Korakrit Arunanondchai and Alex Gvojic (Bangkok & New York), Lawrence Lek (London), Lu Yang (Shanghai), and Saeborg (Tokyo) create worlds that blend myth and reality, simulating more-than-human futures, evolving belief systems and fluid frameworks of being. 

Curated by MCA Australia Curator Anna Davis, the ULTRA UNREAL exhibition reflects on the relevance of mythmaking today and its role in navigating complex realities and creating new worlds. Drawing inspiration from Ning Ken’s theory of the ultra-unreal, it examines how mythologies can be used to reveal hidden histories and reorientate visions of the future.  

Influences from religion, neuroscience, ecology, artificial intelligence, myth, gaming, and queer club cultures collide in this multi-sensory exhibition that ricochets between a dizzying array of stimuli. The fantastical worlds created by these artists in ULTRA UNREAL are grounded in personal experience and politics. Populated by hybrid creatures and genderfluid beings, their worlds are spread across physical and virtual spaces at the MCA. 

MCA Curator Anna Davis says, “The artists and collectives in Ultra Unreal ask questions about belief and technology, empathy and consciousness. In our complex present, thinking critically about the worlds we want to create and inhabit is more important than ever before.” 

Works by Saeborg and Club Ate have emerged from the politics of the dancefloor. Drawing on the vitalities and histories of underground and LGBTQIA+ club communities and pulsing with late-night energy, their practices have been influenced by dance and club culture. Works by Arunanondchai and Gvojic, Lek, and Lu explore concepts of Sinofuturism, gender, reincarnation, animism, empathy and non-human consciousness. 

Exhibition highlights include:

Club Ate’s new video, sound and textile installation Ang Idol Ko / You are My Idol (2022) draws on Filipinx mythologies and club cultures to evoke queer, trans and animist idols for today. The installation combines ancestral figures from the Buwaya (crocodile) and Kinnari (bird) mythologies, and draws on historical accounts of the Babaylan; queer and trans shamans in the Philippines who act as intermediaries between visible and invisible worlds. 

The brightly coloured rural world in Saeborg‘s installation Slaughterhouse (2021-22) masks a darker commentary on gender roles and stereotypes in Japan. Using the role of livestock as an analogy for society’s treatment and expectations of women, Saeborg aims to highlight issues of gender-based power and control in human and nonhuman lives. Slaughterhouse  began as a series of costumes and performances for the Tokyo nightclub Department H. 

Lu Yang creates virtual environments to contemplate the nature of consciousness, suffering, death, and rebirth. ‘I imagine my worlds to be open-ended, non-binary and multi-dimensional’ says Lu, whose digital worlds are populated with genderless avatars. Lu has been working on his latest avatar DOKU for several years. In this new series of works, DOKU appears in six different environments, each representing one of the six realms of rebirth and existence in Buddhist cosmology. 

Exhibited for the first time in Australia, No history in a room filled with people with funny names 5 (2018) is from a series of works Korakrit Arunanondchai has been developing for the past decade. This fifth episode examines unseen forces shaping our reality, and relationships between humans and more-than-human beings in the context of contemporary Thai mythology’. Made in collaboration with Alex Gvojic, the immersive installation features Tosh Basco as the Naga, a recurring character inspired by a mythical serpent and anarchic spirit that can take human form.

Named after a fictional drug for forgetting sorrow in ancient Greek mythology, Lawrence Lek’s series Nepenthe explores connections between memory, virtual worlds, and environments geared towards healing. Nepenthe AR is a new augmented reality (AR) project commissioned by the MCA Australia that invites visitors to discover a series of restorative worlds on each level of the Museum. Nepenthe AR was inspired by the phenomenon known as the ‘doorway effect’; when people forget why they have walked into a room as they enter it.

The exhibition will offer daily screenings of video works by artists Lu Yang, Lawrence Lek, and Saeborg in the Level 2 Veolia Lecture Theatre. Running from Tuesday–Sunday, at 10.30am, 12.30pm and 2.30pm . Session length: 1 hour 40 minutes.

The screening order includes:

Lu Yang, Delusional Mandala, 2015, single-channel digital animation, HD, colour, sound, 16:27 minutes        

Lu Yang, DOKU – Documentary, 2020, single-channel video, HD, colour, sound, 2:40 minute

Lu Yang, DOKU – Facial Capture, 2020, single-channel video, HD, colour, sound, 3:02 minutes

Lawrencee Lek, Sinofuturism (1839–2046 AD), 2016, single-channel video, HD, colour, stereo sound, 60 minutes

Saeborg, Pigpen Movie, 2016, single-channel video, HD, colour, sound, 18:09 minutes

ULTRA UNREAL is on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, MCA Level 1 Galleries  until Sunday 2 October 2022. Entry is free.

Featured image : Lu Yang – Dokusho Dokushi. Photos of artworks by Ben Apfelbaum.

 

 

 

 

Published by Ben Apfelbaum

My photography began when my father handed me the proverbial brownie box camera as a child. As cameras developed I went through Fujica and Olympus range finders graduating to my first single lens reflex camera, the Minolta SRT101, the latter being the greatest facilitator to my growth as a photographer. Digital photography has only added to this. I was a regular contributor to Camera Craft magazine (Australian Camera ) for over three years. During Australia’s Bicentennial year (1988) I made it a personal project to document the celebrations. This culminated in the creation of a book of my photos which was published in 1989. The book was called CELEBRATING AUSTRALIA and came with an accompanying calendar. My works have appeared in a number of publications including the coffee book entitled MY AUSTRALIA (1989), publisher Robertsbridge Severn. This book had a preface by the then Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke. I was a co-photographer on a book entitled SYDNEY- DISCOVER THE CITY with text written by Robert Treborland. Major Mitchell Press was the publisher. Also for two years I was the photographer for calendars celebrating Sydney’s multicultural communities. The two calendars were entitled MULTICULTURAL SYDNEY. My work appeared in a group exhibition held at Sydney’s Town Hall pertaining to the diversity of life in South America to raise money for orphanages there. I have over one hundred photos stored in the New South Wales State Library archive. I had a solo exhibition held in 2007 entitled Ben’s Lens at the Sydney Jewish Museum which celebrated the vibrancy of the Sydney Jewish community. Some of these photos are on the Museum’s permanent display. I have exhibited internationally firstly at the Spruill Gallery in Atlanta Georgia, united states, and in an exhibition entitled Kosher and Co at the Jewish Museum in Berlin. Currently I am a regular contributor to J-Wire and this esteemed publication.