Shift
Linda Dement and Jessie Boylan
Multi-channel video, dimensions variable
13 mins, 15 seconds
2016
Shift deals with the seeming impossibility of curtailing or halting the build-up of nuclear weapons. It engages with facts too large to live with and impacts too huge, microscopic or diffuse to pin down; the work distills from the complicated actualities of our nuclear age, a resonant, immediate manifestation that combines testimony, data and mythology through a multi-channel video work. Shift creates space to allow the imagination to enter the impossibility, to encounter the unseen and ever present reality and to consider our current precarious status and human position within it.
While this work was being made, 15,350 nuclear weapons were held globally. Now, in 2022, there are13,082 - https://ploughshares.org/world-nuclear-stockpile-report — an unseen but oppressively present threat of obliteration and contamination. This project delves into overwhelming forces, incomprehensible periods of time, microscopic corporeality, power relations, fears, urgencies and good intentions that intertwine around the atomic.
Shift was part of the major touring exhibition, Black Mist Burnt Country, curated by JD Mittman of Burrinja Cultural Centre. The exhibition commemorates the 60th anniversary of British atomic tests at Maralinga, showing artworks by Indigenous and non-Indigenous post-war and contemporary artists. The show will tour Australia throughout 2016–2018.
Credits:
3D Artist: Alex Boylan
Additional footage and photographs: Paul Shambroom, Danni Marwick, Marcus Atkinson, Gem Romuld and Alex Boylan.
Voice and Testimony: Tom Uren, Sakue Shimohira, Joy Barton, Janice Abo Ganis, John Mandelberg, Paige Larianova, Nicholas Sherman, Linda Dement and Jessie Boylan.
Special thanks to Paul Brown, Ellise Barkley, Yalata Anangu Community, Tilman Ruff, Phoebe Barton, Merilyn Fairskye, Bundanon Trust and Burrinja Cultural Centre
Shift has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body. It has also been supported by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund and Museums and Galleries NSW.