Place Unmaking 

Contemporary New Zealand film and video artists are often called on to engage in ‘place-making’ in public art projects and landscape film programmes. Yet moving image artists also play a role in ‘un-making’ place by interrogating or reinventing our heroic landscape tradition. This programme traces the promise of the post-war boosterism of government newsreels; the end of the neighbourly dream of state housing; urban beaches constructed from the soil of motorways; the bicultural politics of air; a taonga collection in Dusky Sound. New Zealand filmmakers also negotiate landscapes of the Americas – in Andrew Denton’s film of the escalating pine beetle epidemics that have decimated forests on the West Coast of the USA; and in Phil Dadson’s film shot in the isolated gorge in the Valle de Luna region of the Atacama Desert, northern Chile. These artists both document and construct imaginative, post-natural landscapes where social and bio-physical ecologies are captured in intimate performances of the camera. — JR & MW

Curated by Janine Randerson and Mark Williams. Presented by CIRCUIT Artist Film and Video Aotearoa New Zealand – circuit.org.nz