“. . . uncover hidden histories and reorientate visions of the future.”
“I have been researching artists working at the intersection of performance and simulation for many years,” Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) curator Anna Davis tells me about Ultra Unreal: New myths for new worlds, an exhibition that evolved from ongoing Australian and international research. “I was interested in how artists were simulating and performing other realities, and by doing so, creating new worlds.” From this research, Ning Ken’s concept of the ultra-unreal emerged as a key theoretical frame.
“Ning’s idea was complex, dealt exclusively with literature and was specific to China,” Davis says, “but in a very broad sense, it seemed to be arguing that what we need now are new myths for the new kinds of worlds we are creating and inhabiting.” This idea resonated with Davis who “became interested in how the process of creating new worlds could give birth to new mythologies, and how artists were re-imagining myths in their work to uncover hidden histories and reorientate visions of the future.”
Korakrit Arunanondchai and Alex Gvojic (with Tosh Basco), No history in a room filled with people with funny names 5 (still), 2018, three-channel video, HD, colour, and sound. Commissioned by Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève for Biennale of Moving Images. © the artist. Courtesy the artist, Bangkok City Gallery, Thailand, Carlos/Ishikawa, London, C L E A R I N G, New York/Brussels, Kukje Gallery, Seoul and Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney
The works of six artists and collectives are featured; the exhibition is “imagined as a constellation of artists’ worlds spread across physical and virtual spaces.” Worlds that take many different exhibition forms, including five immersive installations in the MCA galleries, as well as film screenings, augmented reality, and live performances. Davis’ “extended curatorial process” – more than a decade researching artists’ practices in many cases – has made for interesting reflection in light of current-decade disruptions; the world having been “tipped off its axis” since Davis first began conceptualising the exhibition in 2017.
As the originally scheduled 2020 opening came and went Davis continued to communicate with the artists, coming to realise that while live performance and nightlife essentially stopped overnight at the height of the pandemic, the “questions these artists are asking in their works – about belief and technology, empathy, and consciousness, and perhaps most significantly, about who gets to invent the future – seem more relevant now than ever before.” Conceptualising the works here as evidence of “a worldbuilding practice” forms the clearest path to sense-making, with those featured “creating elaborate costumes, sets and performances, using gaming technologies to generate avatars and virtual environments, and working with sound, film, and video to create sonic atmospheres and cinematic cosmologies.”
Lawrence Lek, Geomancer (still), 2017, single-channel video, HD, colour, and sound. © the artist. Courtesy the artist, Sadie Coles HQ, London and Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney
Works by Club Ate and Saeborg, for example, emerged from the politics of the dancefloor and draw on the vitalities and histories of queer nightclub communities in Sydney and Tokyo, respectively. While “other works pulse with late-night energy and reflect the sensory overload and transformative potential of night-time realms,” Davis says, with Korakrit Arunanondchai and Alex Gvojic (Bangkok and New York), Lawrence Lek (London), and Lu Yang (Shanghai) exploring concepts of Sinofuturism, gender, reincarnation, animism, empathy, and non-human consciousness.
Certainly, there is transformative potential in seeing Ultra Unreal’s works as dedicated to worldbuilding. “Mainstream media tends to frame nightclubs solely in terms of pleasure-seeking,” Davis says. Here, nightclubs’ history as incubators of ideas in the arts is reflected as these spaces are shown to be “sites of collective gathering that have inspired some artists to invent alternative worlds. At a time of ecological collapse and the rise of both extremism and powerful regimes of normativity, they can offer artists and communities space to imagine and perform other realities.”
Lu Yang, Animal (still), 2021, single-channel digital animation, HD, colour, and sound. © the artist. Courtesy the artist, COMA, Sydney and Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney
I find resonance with my own cross-decades research here, such as the revelation as a doctoral student that came in discovering Sarah Thornton’s 1990s exploration of club cultures as mixing pots, rich in “subcultural capital.” An understanding and space to speak that opened the doors on the dance clubs and raves of Britain and revealed that what pulsed within these nightclubs were vibrant microcosms of culture and youth; such ideas that came with a promise: to propel us beyond the moral panic of the press and popular imaginary of that present in favour of more meaningful, though still radical, futures.
Davis seems to have had similar revelations, telling me: “The artists and collectives in Ultra Unreal explore the radical potential of building worlds that blur myth and reality, using them to animate possible futures, unsettle accepted truths and binaries, and open spaces for other modes of consciousness to arise.” As for the viewer, experience of these works is bound to be as complex, personal, and immersive as the night-spaces to which the art connects; prompting emotions, in the curator’s words, that “might include feelings of empathy and interconnectedness, or a sense of wonder or curiosity. Some people might even feel like dancing.”
Dr Joseph Brennan is an art critic, author and cultural scholar based in Far North Queensland.
Museum of Contemporary Art Australia
22 July to 2 October 2022
Sydney
