Ian Haig is an Australian artist who, since 1994, has worked as a Senior Lecturer in Media Art and Expanded Studio Practice at the School of Art at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT). His work has been exhibited in galleries and video/media festivals around the world, including exhibitions at: The Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne; The Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne; The Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide; The Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne; Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Artec Biennale – Nagoya, Japan; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Art Museum of China, Beijing; Museum Villa Rot, Burgrieden-Rot, Germany. In addition his video work has screened in over 120 Festivals internationally. In 2003 he received a fellowship from the New Media Arts Board of the Australia Council and in 2013 he curated the video art show Unco at The Torrance Art Museum in Los Angeles.

Ian Haig works across media, from video, sculpture, drawing, technology-based media and installation. Haig’s practice refuses to accept that the low and the base level are devoid of value and cultural meaning. His body-obsessed themes can be seen throughout a large body of work over the last twenty years. Previous works have looked to the contemporary media sphere and its relationship to the visceral body, the degenerative aspects of pervasive new technologies, to cultural forms of fanaticism and cults, to ideas of attraction and repulsion, body horror, the defamiliarisation of the human body and cartoon abjection.

The mutating conditions of the body overwhelm our screens; from television, cinema, the mobile phone and computer screen. The materiality of the body is ever present on screen – the history of Hollywood, is the history of the body – so intimate is our relationship with the screen it can be considered an extension and outgrowth of our own biology. The screen becomes a projection of our desires, obsessions and perversions.

Ian Haig’s recent work has largely focused on the confrontation of the body and its relationship to the contemporary media landscape. Haig works in an interdisciplinary fashion, evolving his practice at times to include sculptural elements in his time-based works, particularly sculptural works of bodily materiality which explore a visceral aesthetic. During his Residency at MOMENTUM, Haig will continue his research on how the video screen and technology can be considered as extensions of our own biology – the body as a screen, and the screen as bodily material – and furthermore, how bodily confrontation can be activated through time-based media. Haig will research, develop, and produce a major new video work exploring visceral simulation of the human body in his multi-screen video work Untitled Syndrome.

One preoccupation of 20th century modernism was the the deformation of the human body and face. Depicted in a variety of different paintings and sculpture the face was consistently altered, cut up, and distorted. This reconfiguration and mutation of the face is now echoed in contemporary culture and notions of body dysmorphia (or digitised dysmorphic disorder). Amplified by selfie culture and social media and a growing perception that one’s body is thought to look wrong and doesn’t adhere to ‘normal’ images of the ‘standard’ body. Untitled Syndrome brings together the modernist white cube gallery with the mediated, monstrous visualisations of digitised dysmorphia and the disfigured contemporary face.

Using images of contemporary art galleries and museums in Berlin, the work considers the gallery as a site of purity, taste and sanctification which separates itself from the real world outside. Untitled Syndrome considers how the traditional boundaries of the art gallery and life are Increasingly eroding through the new authority of the internet and social media.