Seeing the proliferation in galleries of long, sparse, indulgent, and hookless video installations that obliquely refer to the ancestral practices of unspecified, distant peoples, one might suspect that this trend in ‘radical’ filmmaking is the work of a conspiracy. Ra’s thirty-minute montage of washed-out wide shots lacks as much in action as it does in structure. Landscapes from a Philippine village wash over the screen and occasionally play host to livestock and human figures performing yogic-like dance movements. A colour-field sequence with designer subtitles relays fragments of a conversation between a grandmother and grandchild, the sense of which is ungraspable in the cut. The sign-reader’s desire is only obliquely rewarded by a prolonged scene, shot through a lens smeared thickly with Vaseline, in which a group of people allegorically adore a trans beauty queen.
Generously, one could compare such work to meditation. It might, at a push, be a piece of instructional diplomacy. But the gallery’s deployment of “a pedagogy of decolonial choreography” and branding the artist’s hometown of Sidney “Gadigal land, Eora Nation” break the spell. Such work was once a mere grift. But when it is this boring and has so deeply captured even the most cynical of art institutions, it is an outright stitch-up.
