Sublime / Internal / Subliminal

On Friday, March 17 and Saturday, March 18 at 7:30pm NeMe invites you to the NeMe Arts Centre, Limassol, for the screenings of seven videos created by ten Australian artists curated by Shaun Wilson. The event is supported by the School of Media and Communication, RMIT University.

Over the last ten years, Australian video artists have developed a refreshed attention to the sublime and the subliminal in their creative practice. While media and communication technology has offered a change in the way artists create, archive, show and access their work – from affordable, higher quality cameras, and easily accessible file storage to the instantaneous distribution from social and digital media platforms – the tools of image making may have advanced, yet the poetic and conceptual enquiry behind such image production has remained constant. ​Sublime/Internal/Subliminal brings together a cross selection of emerging and established artists who reflect this constant.

Throughout the last five years, for example, global events have brought a unified social disruption – from Brexit and the war in Syria to the US election, mass refugee crisis and climate change, just to name a few – yet many artists have reflected these disruptions in more overt political commentary inasmuch as they have, at the same time, travelled inwards to reflect on their own poetics and subliminal grasp of the world around them.

Reflecting on this, the works selected in the show cement a three part conceptual rationale representing the sublime, the internal, and the subliminal into the one central philosophic space. With that said, each of these perspectives congeal a singular outcome for the viewer to arrive at a point of uneasiness, whether this be literally or more suggested. I am reminded of a recent photograph by Quique Kierszenbaum from The Guardian titled ‘The Worst View in the World’, depicting an inside view of Banksy’s new hotel ‘The Walled Off Hotel’ which depicts an outwardly view from the hotel guided by a gentrified tourist telescope looking straight onto a graffitied cement slab from the current barrier wall ‘separating Israel from the Palestinian territories.’ (Graham-Harrison, 2017) The similarity in this instance is that Kierszenbaum’s image makes use of the archetypal elements of classical German landscape romanticists, notably Friedrich, and places these props into a quintessential representation of conflict governed by the fortified separation wall thus combining a sublime, an internal and a subliminal contextualisation into the one kind of visual thematic.

One of the more interesting notions about this approach is that the idea of global political resistance is emerging as a non political methodology for artists.

Participating artists: Brie Trenerry; Kieran Boland; Darrin Verhagen (aka Shinjuku Thief) & Richard Grant; John A Douglas; Monique Skurrie; Liam Nguyen, Johnson Nguyen, Nora Ashqar, & Yue Shen; Shaun Wilson
Curated by Shaun Wilson

Please note that the same program will be shown on both days.