VIDEO 2025
VIDEO 2025 is curated by Rachel Ciesla, Curator for the Art Gallery of Western Australia’s Simon Lee Foundation Institute of Contemporary Asian Art (Boorloo/Perth).
Don’t Live in the Future presents five videos that delve into the emotional and perceptual resonance of images. The liminal, reductive and appropriative constructive strategies employed in these works accumulate – evoking a sense of immortality as they are archived in human history, reaching out to, and reached at by, so many others.
Cut from one seductive, unsettling, revelatory frame to another: does this sequence of images make you self-conscious? All of us just wanting to exist beyond our time. Acutely aware that nothing in life has any meaning except that which you assign to it. What if you let go—let go, let really go? No one owes you anything. There’s no shame IN life’s misfortunes. Your history is perfect so don’t look now. Don’t give in to nostalgia. Forget us all.
Balance your desire to transform with your need to be understood, or else, kill me in this maze of endless deferment. It isn’t always possible to think before you speak—sometimes, the only way out is through. Don’t come back, don’t come see me. I won’t let you in my house. Understand?
Artists include Destiny Deacon (KuKu and Erub/Mer) and Erin Hefferon, presented by Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery (Gadigal Country/Sydney); Sara Cwynar presented by Cooper Cole (Toronto); Oliver Laric presented by Tanya Leighton (Berlin, Los Angeles); Ceal Floyer presented by Esther Schipper (Berlin, Paris, Seoul); and Tong Wenmin, presented by White Space (Beijing) in association with Videotage (Hong Kong).
Warning: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are advised that this pages contains the name of a person who has died.
Destiny Deacon and Erin Hefferon
No place like home, 1999
single-channel digital video (colour, sound)
3 min 55 sec
Edition of 15
A woman stands on the road in Perth’s King’s Park at night, a piano faintly plays Somewhere Over the Rainbow, road signs lit up by cars flashing by in the darkness.
Destiny Deacon is a descendant of the KuKu (Far North Queensland) and Erub/Mer (Torres Strait) people. Since the 1990s Deacon’s work has been primarily involved with performative photography, exploring Indigenous identity with often provocative and humorous imagery that mocks and satirises clichéd and racist stereotypes. Partly autobiographical and partly fictitious, Deacon’s work is an insightful comedy that is effective in establishing a discourse about political, Indigenous and feminist concerns.
Represented by Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery (Gadigal Country/Sydney), Booth D1.
Oliver Laric
Untitled, 2014–2015
4K video (colour, sound)
5 min 55 sec
Edition of 5 + 2 AP
In this video we encounter a robot morphing into a car, an Egyptian statue accumulating detail, a snake becoming a dancing elephant (adapted from Dumbo), and a baby turning into an old man. Laric draws on distinct styles and traditions, including imagery from Russia, America, and Japan as well as the language of 1930s cartoons on up to the cyber aesthetic of more recent computer animation.
Oliver Laric (born in 1981 in Innsbruck, Austria) lives and works in Berlin. In his practice, he explores themes such as authorship and authenticity. Working across video, 3D-printed sculpture and installation, Laric’s work demonstrates the ways in which imagery has been (re-)used over time and remains available – to be recycled, over and over, in inventive and contemporary ways. 3D models of all sculptures are available for free download on threedscans.com.
Laric’s work is held in public collections including MuMOK, Vienna; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Cleveland Museum of Art; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Fondation Galleries Lafayette, Paris, and KAI 10 I Arthena Foundation, Düsseldorf, among many others.
Presented by Tanya Leighton (Berlin, Los Angeles).
Tong Wenmin
Wave, 2019
performance by Ara Dinawan in Dinawan Malaysia
single channel video (colour, silent)
19 min 46 sec
On the beach, the body moves with the waves. Tong Wenmin’s work often focuses on the intersection between individual perception and the external environment, stimulating visual poetry and inspiring action through behaviours that at first seem counter-intuitive. Through often simplified or regulated movements, her work hints at the allegorical character of the body and action within a semantically rich context.
TONG Wenmin (b. 1989, Chongqing, China) received her BFA at Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 2012. TONG has recent solo / duo shows at Macalline Art Center, Beijing; Essence Contemporary Art Museum, Chongqing; OCT Boxes Art Museum, Foshan; WHITE SPACE, Beijing; Thousand Plateau Art Space, Chengdu; Organ Haus Art Space, Chongqing, and recent group shows / art festival at National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul; Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong; M+, Hong Kong; Salzburg Museum der Moderne, Salzburg; Gamle Strand, Copenhagen; Lillehammer Art Museum, Lillehammer; HE ART MUSEUM, Foshan; OCAT Shenzhen, Shenzhen; By Art Matters, Hangzhou; Power Station of Art, Shanghai; Koganecho Area Management Center, Yokohama; Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; A4 Art Museum, Chengdu; House of Egorn, Berlin; BARRAK, Okinawa; Responding: International Performance Art Festival and Meeting 2018, Tokyo & Fukushima; Adelaide Festival Centre, Adelaide; Petach Tikva Museum of Art, Tel Aviv. She won the Grand Jury Prize of Huayu Youth Award in 2018, the First Prize of the 8th New Star Art Award by Deji Art Museum in 2018, Nomination Prize of The 5th Contemporary Sculpture Award in 2017, the Accolade Artist by Documentaries of Chinese Performance Art in 2016. She has also been selected for MQ Artist-in-Residence Program: Art & Ecology Studio, Vienna (2024); The Swiss Arts Council Artists Residency, Switzerland (2023); Offshore Residency, Dinawan Island (2019) and other residencies project. TONG currently works and lives in Chongqing
Presented by White Space (Beijing) in association with Videotage (Hong Kong).
Sara Cwynar
Red Film, 2018
16mm film transferred to high-definition video (colour, sound)
13 min 1 sec
Cwynar’s Red Film (2018)—the third film in a trilogy with Soft Film (2016) and Rose Gold (2017)—considers the consumerism that permeates our lives through the process of studio staging, bridging analog nostalgia with our contemporary economy of endless choice.
Sara Cwynar (b. 1985, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada) is interested in the way that images accumulate, endure, and change in value over time. Her conceptual photographs and films involve constant archiving and re-presentation of collected visual materials, layering diverse imagery with references to art theory. The works intricately recall advertisements, retail catalogues, and old art history textbooks. Her visual assemblages meditate on how vernacular images shape collective world views, and how those ideals can change through time and contextual manipulation. Cwynar was one of the recipients of the 2020 Sobey Art Award, the 2020 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, and the 2021 Shpilman Photography Prize. She earned her Bachelor of Design from York University in 2010 and her MFA from Yale University in 2016.
Presented by Cooper Cole (Toronto).
Ceal Floyer
Plughole, 2017
video-projection (colour, sound)
3 min 53 sec
Edition of 3
A static camera is trained on a standard 6-hole bathroom sink drain. The video depicts a stream of water that is redirected in an attempt to fill each hole perfectly with the flow of the faucet, moving from one hole to the next. The drain’s function as a receptacle for water becomes a kind of short-circuit, as water itself becomes the material that plugs its own pathway.
Presented by Esther Schipper (Berlin, Paris, Seoul).
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