Haegue Yang: Triple Vita Nestings / Karrabing Film Collective: The Mermaids: Mirror Worlds

The Institute of Modern Art (IMA) is pleased to present exhibitions by Haegue Yang and Karrabing Film Collective. This is Yang’s first institutional solo exhibition in Australia after her participation in the 8th Asia Pacific Triennial (2015–2016) and the recent 21st Biennale of Sydney. It is also Karrabing Film Collective’s first solo show in their native Australia, after having their critically acclaimed work screened and exhibited internationally.

Haegue Yang: Triple Vita Nestings
Bringing together selected works from more than a decade of Yang’s practice, these pieces straddle seemingly opposing artistic legacies and aesthetics, between conceptual art strategies and materially-driven craft techniques, industrial production and the handmade, and importantly for this exhibition, between figuration and abstraction. Yang’s work undoes these supposed binaries and creates immersive and imaginative experiences.

Triple Vita Nestings uses formal strategies—such as layering, doubling, splitting, and merging— to reveal how individual subjects are embedded in the lives, stories, and contexts of others. Multi-sensory environments, figurative forms, and voiceover narration evoke the biographies of real figures, as well as mythical or allegorical creatures, and self-reflexive ideas of alienation and neighbourliness. Though these stories and ideas may be distinct, they are not presented in isolation: each character nests inside another, representing our interwoven or parallel realities. Yang has drawn from biographies of historical figures, manifesting pre-existing encounters among them or alternately drawing idiosyncratic parallels between seemingly unrelated figures. Yang’s point of view on history, literature, and personal experience empowers us to perceive nested sets, or relations, between otherwise disparate lives.

Karrabing Film Collective: The Mermaids: Mirror Worlds
Karrabing means "tide out" in Eminyengal Indigenous language and refers to a time of coming together as well as to the coastline that connects members of the Karrabing Film Collective who come from many family groups in the far north of Australia. For their first solo exhibition in Australia, these award-winning film-makers are presenting their latest work, The Mermaids: Mirror Worlds (2018), a two-channel installation exploring the present and future of Western industrial toxicity. The work is co-commissioned by the IMA, Frontier Imaginaries, PUBLICS, and the Van Abbemuseum.

Karrabing Film Collective describes The Mermaids: Mirror Worlds as "an exploration of the present future vision in a new exploration of western industrial toxicity. Screens alternate between publicly accessible promotional films of chemical giants such as Monsanto and a story of young Indigenous man, Aiden, taken away when he was just a baby to be a part of a medical experiment to save the white race, and who is then released back into the world of his family. As he travels with his father and brother across the landscape, he confronts two possible futures and pasts embodied by his own tale and the current fantasies of multinational chemical and extractive industries." Alongside, The Mermaids: Mirror Worlds, the IMA will present works that depart from an ancestral journey of the distant past, Night-time Go (2017), and the present, Seenandunseen (2017).

In conjunction with the opening of Karrabing Film Collective’s exhibition The Mermaids: Water Worlds, Vivian Ziherl of Frontier Imaginaries has organised the event Water Mirrors. The event will include contributions from artists Delvene Cockatoo-Collins, Karrabing Film Collective, and Rachel O’Reilly.

About the Institute of Modern Art
Since 1975, the IMA has been one of Australia’s leading independent forums for art and its discourses. The IMA is supported by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland, the Australian Government through Australia Council for the Arts, and the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, an initiative of the Australian Federal, State, and Territory Governments.

Triple Vita Nestings is presented in partnership with the 21st Biennale of Sydney, and made possible with generous support from the Australia Council for the Arts, the Korea Foundation and assistance from Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen.

The Mermaids: Mirror Worlds is commissioned by Frontier Imaginaries, IMA, PUBLICS, and the Van Abbemuseum, with support from the Australian Government’s Indigenous Languages and Arts program.