Samstag's Spring season showcases three moving image installations that explore the complex relationship between fiction and documentary and offer an insight into history, imagination and storytelling.
For over a decade, Samstag and the Adelaide Film Festival have pioneered an important, fruitful collaboration in the presentation of art and the moving image. Our 2021 Spring season brings together three major moving image installations that rest on the tension between fact and fiction.
The selected works represent a particular nexus of film and art, where documentary, genre, storytelling and concepts of space come into focus.
In Samstag’s ground floor gallery, Pilar Mata Dupont’s The Ague draws upon the scientific world of London’s Kew Gardens to tease out the irrationality, truths and misinformation that permeate our colonial history and ecological future.
Upstairs, the Karrabing Film Collective’s Night Time Go, begins hewing closely to the historical details of the disenfranchisement of Indigenous peoples before slowly morphing into an alternative history in which drama, humour and satire turn the tables on the powerful. Shot on country and in community, it is a work that represents truly innovative, collaborative film making.
Lastly, Israeli-born, Berlin based Omer Fast’s Continuity tells a disturbing tale of a middle-class couple who engage a succession of actors to play the part of their son, a young soldier supposedly returned from Afghanistan. A fiction with the air of authenticity, Fast’s work is a reminder that the work of a filmmaker can deceive as effectively as it can reveal.
WATCH /
Conversations with artists, filmmakers, academics and curators, from recent ON ART programs at Samstag.
SYMPOSIUM / THREE CONVERSATIONS
James Nguyen & Victoria Pham with Stephen Zagala
Taloi Havini with Professor Nicholas Thomas
James Tylor with Dr Frances Wyld
