Otherwise-image-worlds

“The otherwise in all its plentitude vibrates afar off and near, here but also… there.”

—Ashon Crawley

Te Uru and CIRCUIT present Otherwise-image-worlds, an exhibition of five newly commissioned artworks from artists Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Juliet Carpenter, Tanu Gago, Ary Jansen and Sorawit Songsataya to ask what modes of interaction, imagination, attention, and refusal animation can cultivate.

How can animation in contemporary moving image practices be critical of the commercial demand for spectacle and efficiency? How can it serve as a tool for worldbuilding and re-imagining history beyond imperialist, white, cis, male-dominated narratives?

For nearly two centuries animation has been expanding and reconfiguring the conventions of image-making to create new experiences in the realms of art and entertainment: from science-fiction and speculative narratives to cartoon- and video game-based worlds.

Where the polish and ease of contemporary image economies work to obscure power structures, Otherwise-image-worlds experiments with how the making and circulation of animation can be oppositional in playful, oblique, and sometimes-awkward ways.

In Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s multiplayer game, identity determines power and power shifts as identities change. Like Brathwaite-Shirley, whose video game aesthetics hark back to the crunchy textures and clunky, block-like forms of eighties and nineties console games, Tanu Gago’s 3D stereoscopic collaboration with COVEN arts collective draws on forms popularised during the artist’s youth. Ary Jansen interleaves machinima (recordings of real-time gaming) from popular gaming titles such as Grand Theft Auto 5, Red Dead Redemption 2, The Last of Us and Detroit: Become Human, Final Fantasy 14 and RuneScape with footage captured across Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland. Juliet Carpenter’s vertiginous short film revels in the indeterminate space between deadness and liveness, animate and inanimate. Sorawit Songsataya’s fragmentary point cloud compositions encapsulate the slow disintegration of memory and ongoing environmental ruin, using data mapping technology to reconstruct spaces in Ōtepoti Dunedin and the artist’s mother’s home in Chiang Rai, Thailand.

Otherwise-image-worlds, developed in partnership with Te Uru, is part of CIRCUIT Artist Moving Image’s annual commissioning series in which five artists are invited to make a new work in response to a theme selected by a curator-at-large.

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s commission is developed in partnership with Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival and Spike Island, Bristol.

Curated by Tendai Mutambu. Exhibition design by Samuel Aislabie.

Images: Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, 2022. Courtesy of the artist.