Driving You Mad, Driving You Crazy

13 Oct 2017

David & Sue talk to Mathieu Copeland about his Melbourne Festival event “The Exhibition of a Film”

Arts, Festivals, Interview

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David & Sue talk to Mathieu Copeland about his Melbourne Festival event “The Exhibition of a Film”.

Can a cinema screen host an exhibition?

That’s the puzzle at the heart of this unorthodox work by London-based curator, Mathieu Copeland. Calling on the talents of dozens of major international artists from a broad spectrum of creative disciplines, Copeland has pieced together an exhibition that can be screened.

Artists were commissioned to make moving-image and surround-sound works that fit within the cinema environment. The result is a film in which audio-visual elements come together to challenge our ideas of art and its presentation.

Copeland worked closely with live art director Tim Etchells (Forced Entertainment, 2005 Melbourne Festival Bloody Mess), who was engaged to oversee the ‘dramaturgy’ of the film by compiling the commissioned works into a cohesive sequence.

Composer, artist and noise rock legend, Susan Stenger (Band of Susans) was commissioned to develop a soundtrack for the film, which overlaps and binds a number of individual contributions. Stenger produced a series of songs that explode into the cinema space, in collaboration with proto-punk front man Alan Vega (Suicide), master of indie power ballads Nick Cave, avant-garde mistress Cosey Fanni Tutti (ex Throbbing Gristle), folk singer Sam Gleaves and avant-pop songstress Lætitia Sadier (Stereolab).

Moving-image works include the witty behavioral experiments of Michael Portnoy, the haunting audio-visual operas of Meredith Monk, the socio-political constructs of Fia Backström, the highly disciplined choreographic gestures of Jonathan Burrows, and the obliquely conceptual language-based art of Lawrence Weiner, alongside many other innovative practitioners.

You can book at the Melbourne Festival website – it’s only on for one night on 14th October so be quick.