Happening
Institutional Capture
Brisbane, AustraliaDetails
| Part of | OtherFilm Festival 2014 |
| Where | Boggo Road Gaol |
| Starts | Wednesday, 26 November 2014 |
| Ends | Wednesday, 26 November 2014 |
Institutional Capture
Boggo Road Gaol. November 26, 2014.
Institutions describe, and in many ways circumscribe, contemporary life. (How we work, exhibit, believe, are educated, represented, defended, funded, etc). An institution can be considered ‘captured’ when interested parties – powerful elites, but also willful or subversive individuals – exert influence within or upon it to systematically achieve their ends.
In line for a $30million dollar “facelift”, Queensland’s notorious prison-cum-historical- attraction, Boggo Road Gaol, is the latest Brisbane legacy building currently up for (agenda) reassignment.
Originally a women’s prison, home for nearly 100 years to some of the cruellest treatment of human beings in this State’s penal history, it is now a heritage-listed site for dark tourism ventures, with its grounds soon to house a classy urban village.
Already, there’s all kinds of life here: informative day tours and ghost tours held at night; farmers’ markets on the weekends; the space often rings out with music. And people have birthdays, office parties and weddings there.
We are going to engage with this space and its discrepancies and resonances, its economies, realisms and apparitions.
The building hasn’t been knocked down in a State that consistently knocks everything down. Boggo Road wants to live.
This is who will be in the show:
Andrew McLellan (Brisbane) * Andrew Tuttle (Brisbane) * Bonnie Hart (Brisbane) * Caitlin Franzmann (Brisbane) * David Spooner * Drew Daniel (Baltimore) * Emile Zile (Melbourne) * Gerald Keaney & Laura Hill (Brisbane) * Kiah Reading (Brisbane) * Leena Riethmuller (Brisbane) * Nicola Morton (Brisbane) * Rebecca Ross (Burleigh Heads) * Ruth McConchie (Brisbane)
Curators: Danni Zuvela, Joel Stern
Producer: Dhana Merritt
Technical Producer: David M. Thomas
Production Assistant: Audrey Lam
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TEXTS AND LINKS
This event is part of Screen Queensland’s annual program of screen culture.
Institutional Capture - WORKS
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15 mins
Kiah Reading’s BE YOUR OWN BOSS observes the rituals of corporate culture within the dialectical space of Boggo Road Gaol’s Number 2 Division. “There are sometimes soundtracks to the office. There are the phones that ring. And the mobile phones…
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installation
“If you are protected from dark things then you have no protection of, knowledge of, or understanding of dark things when they show up.” — Neil Gaiman “The struggle of people (against power) is the struggle of memory against forgetting”.–…
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installation
David Spooner will be drawing prison tatts in felt-tip pen throughout the night.
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15 mins
The ‘single erratic display’ – irregular, unpredictable movements – is a characteristic of how single prey animals flee from a predator. Leena Riethmuller’s activated flight mechanism will pit the body against architecture, mammalian behaviour against the automatic functioning of…
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Installation
Rebecca Ross’ ESCAPE EXERCISE bathes in sunlight and water, but there is also something darker hinted at as the image dips and slips beneath the waterline. The ankle monitor’s point of view reveals the clouds of grit swirling swirling with…
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20 mins
Boggo Road Gaol was closed in 1989.
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20 mins
“Through the haze of conceptual capture the boundaries of physical independence are blurred. Socially exiled, rehabilitation occurs in small withdrawn rooms festering with external and internal punishment. The embodiment of crime from the dog bed of Maslow’s decapitated pyramid. Rehabilitated…
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installation
Institutional Capture: How We Do It OtherFilm Festival 2014 has asked us how would we capture the Institution? This is my answer. –> My father was a screw. He started with seemingly impossible ideals of social change in the…
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20 mins
Franzmann and McLellan’s TOGETHER, WE’LL SHOW THE WORLD takes machinic consistency as the first key co-ordinate in their investigation into systems of power and control. The other coordinate is you, specifically your body, as a sensing vehicle that is also…
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installation
Five prisoners on the roof. Five inflatable men. Five incarcerated. Five inflatable.
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20 mins
…from soapbox to Senate is inspired by Gordon Brown, a gentleman of the Commonwealth (Australia via Canada and United Kingdom) who variously as a radical agitator, subversive, unionist and respected ALP politician served stints both as the President of the Senate…