August '24 Moving Image Program

Judith Klavins, Windsignalling Instrument No. 4, moving image (still) 3:46 mins

Through the field of contemporary installation, Judith Klavins speculates upon her connection to the coast, its flux and unpredictability.  This is where Klavins grew up and to where she regularly returns.

Through a family diary, Klavins discovered that some of her maternal ancestors lived on the coast, on King Island, lutruwita Tasmania, in the middle of Bass Strait in the 1830s.  A sealer lived and raised a family with a Tasmanian First Nations woman.  The archives reveal that such relationships were often coercive.  Klavins thinks about these troubling and complex histories and responds to the gaps in archival narratives by offering an immersive and embodied experience for viewers to encounter, so that they too can experience the anxiety and tension that she feels.

'This work developed by combining silk, fishing line, the wind, and sunlight, and was photographed at a local Adelaide beach. It responds to the flux and unpredictability of nature, of forces both seen and unseen.  Standing on the beach, I look out to sea and think about my maternal ancestors who lived on King Island in Bass Strait, lutruwita (Tasmania) in the 1830s and their practice of making a smoke and raising the wiff (flag) to trade wallaby skins with passing ships.' Judith Klavins, 2024

Whilst Klavins does not personally or culturally identify as a First Nations person, her work often addresses her ancestral history, the impact of colonisation, and other ways of being in the world.

hanna jacobsen, body of water, moving image (still) 5:41 mins

Our bodies are reserves of water structured much like our planet: veins and vessels transport blood through our bodies just as tributaries and rivers carry water across land and to the sea; and viscera, such as the human heart, pulsate and pump oxygen-rich blood throughout our bodies, regulating temperatures, just as the ocean controls the circulation of heat and moisture throughout the Earth’s climate system. Our brains, our skin, our kidneys and even our bones are watery; our very movement is liquid. The capacity to see and feel this water within us is radical. It inspires reverence for our precious water sources and reminds us of our existence in relationship to these larger watery bodies and the opportunities we must honour and care for them in return.

body of water, conceived, directed and choreographed by hanna jacobsen, is a videodança in which the camera homes in on the dancers’ desire to hold or to contain water within themselves, which provokes growing swells and currents and, eventually, flooding (within and beyond) - realization of the fuelled, awakened soul. The choreography and music evoke the power and calm of the ocean, its temperaments and tempos, its urgency and more infrequent repose.

hanna is a dancer, educator, translator and filmmaker, who was raised in California. Her work with water and sanitation, and also with experiential and environmental education, led her to the Caribbean, Central and South America, eventually settling in the northeast of Brazil, where she has worked and performed for more than a decade. Her work explores the interplay between the artistic and anthropological and is deeply connected to place.