2022 / Soda Jerk: Hello Dankness

Soda Jerk are a duo who make sample-based experimental films with a rogue documentary impulse. They are fundamentally interested in the politics of images; how they circulate, whom they benefit and how they can be undone. Formed in Sydney in 2002, they’ve been in based in Brooklyn and Berlin since 2010. Following their controversial political revenge fable TERROR NULLIUS (2018), the Samstag will present Soda Jerk’s new feature Hello Dankness, commissioned in partnership with the Adelaide Film Festival.

Hello Dankness is a bent suburban musical that bears witness to the psychotropic cultural spectacle of the period 2016 to 2021. Set in the American suburbs, the film follows a group of neighbours through these years as consensus reality disintegrates into conspiracies and other political contagions. Part political satire, zombie stoner film and Greek tragedy, the work is also informed by the encrypted memetics of contemporary internet culture.

Hello Dankness will be screened as part of Soda Jerk’s survey exhibition Open Sauce, alongside previous works including TERROR NULLIUS and The Was (2015), a collaboration with electronic music group The Avalanches.

Image: Soda Jerk, Hello Dankness (production still), 2022

2020 / Amos Gebhardt: Small Acts of Resistance

Amos Gebhardt presents Small acts of resistance, a new multi-channel video installation demonstrating the power of kinship and community for those outside of the mainstream. Across three screens, we witness survival play out within a variety of Australian contexts. Gebhardt uses portraiture, dance, song and play to tell stories of strength and evolution as a means by which to destabilise oppressive norms and celebrate more expansive and inclusive notions of being. 

Small acts of resistance was created through the South Australian Film Corporation and SALA Festival’s inaugural Artist in Residence commission, and is presented as part of the 2020 Adelaide Film Festival.

Image: Amos Gebhardt, Small acts of resistance, 2020, installation view, Samstag Museum of Art, University of South Australia. Photography by Sam Noonan.

2015 / Hossein Valamanesh: Char Soo

Hossein Valamanesh is noted for his transcendental and enigmatic works of art that engage with Sufi philosophy, ephemerality, and the intersection of nature and culture. Born in Tehran in 1949, he immigrated to Australia in 1973. Since making his home in Adelaide, Valamanesh has become one of Australia’s foremost contemporary artists, at the same time developing an international profile.

Char Soo is the artist’s first large-scale screen based work. This immersive four-screen projection places the viewer in the midst of the bustling crossroad of an Iranian bazaar to contemplate movement, human interaction and the passing of time. The ‘char soo’, or ‘four sides’, is also a metaphor for the country of Iran; itself criss-crossed by invasion and religious and cultural interaction for centuries.

Image: Hossein Valamanesh, Char Soo, 2015, installation view, Samstag Museum of Art, University of South Australia. Photography by Sam Noonan.

2013 / Daniel Crooks: Pan No. 11 Cross Platform Transfer

Daniel Crooks’ major exhibition for the 2013 Adelaide Film Festival challenged audiences used to the narrative qualities of cinema to experience the power of the moving image as a tool to explore the spatial quality of time. In viewing his largest commissioned work to date, viewers traced the slippages and overlaps of bent time as they navigated the folds of what was effectively one screen concertinaed into the vast space of gallery one in the Samstag Museum of Art.

Pan No. 11 (cross-platform transfer) was a technically and conceptually deft treatment of the concept of time itself, and situated one of Australia’s leading contemporary artists within the broader context of film and the moving image.

Image: Daniel Crooks, Pan No.11 (cross-platform transfer), 2013, installation view, Samstag Museum of Art, University of South Australia. Photography by Sam Noonan.

2011 / Warwick Thornton: Stranded

Warwick Thronton, a Kaytej man from central Australia, is a filmmaker of singularly distinctive vision. His first cinematic feature, Samson & Delilah (2009), took the national and international film world by storm. The 2011 Art and Moving Image Commission represented Thornton’s first foray into creating work expressly for an exhibition context.

Entering the darkened gallery, viewers found themselves faced with the three-dimensional spectre of Thornton’s Christ-like figure revolving in space in the brilliant harshness of the broken heartland, the tension heightened by the unnerving sounds of open spaces. An example of technical dexterity matched by conceptual depth, Stranded explores redemption and sacrifice with a sharp satirical edge.  

Image:  Warwick Thornton, Stranded, 2011, film still, 3D digital video: 11:06 minutes, colour, sound, commissioned by the 2011 Adelaide Film Festival Investment Fund, purchased 2011. Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Collection: Queensland Art Gallery. Courtesy the artist.

2009 / Lynette Wallworth: Duality of Light

Lynette Wallworth is an Australian artist who works across video installation, photography, and film. Wallworth’s immersive installation environments are intriguing ecosystems that rely on activation by the viewer.

Duality of Light focused on the interplay between moving image, sound, space and visitor. Wallworth employed interactive technologies that invited visitors to pass through a series of sound thresholds indicated by subtle light transitions into a space that invokes a Cambodian temple. Once inside the temple visitors come face to face with their own image – captured on entering the space – in a layered and confronting spectoral vision.  

Image: Lynette Wallworth, Duality of Light, 2009, film still, Samstag Museum of Art, University of South Australia. Photography by Grant Hancock.