Tracey Moffatt

In an exhibition of art from elsewhere, celebrating otherness and taking place amidst a global pandemic, what better way to open COVIDecameron than with Tracey Moffatt – the first artist to have launched the MOMENTUM Collection in 2010 – with two works from her Hollywood Montages series made together with Gary Hillberg. Doomed (2007) and Other (2009), both beautifully collaged from clips of popular films, are, in turn, comically rousing celebrations of our fascination with global disaster and the perilous attractions of otherness.

Doug Fishbone, Artificial Intelligence, 2018

With no disrespect intended to the countless many who are suffering at the hands of Corona, nevertheless, it has been a global phenomenon to laugh in the face of the outbreak. Making light of even the greatest darkness is a better survival mechanism than despair, and in that sense, Doug Fishbone’s Artificial Intelligence (2018) also paints an oddly prescient portrait of our times, assembled from images found online. From food shortages in shops, to wildlife taking over our city streets, to a willful denial of our own mortality in the face of all evidence to the contrary, we all hope this is not how the Corona pandemic will end.

Mariana Vassileva, Morning Mood, 2010

But perhaps Mariana Vassileva’s Morning Mood (2010) is how it all began – if we are to believe that the virus originated from bats. Shot in Sydney, Australia, during the very days that MOMENTUM drew its first breaths with its inaugural event in Sydney, this portrait of the city’s remarkable bats already makes the jump between species, inverting the animals to show their inherently human characteristics.

Thomas Eller, THE virus – SELBST (C0vid-20-Recovered), 2020

Jumping ahead to the present day, Thomas Eller’s THE virus – SELBST (C0vid-20-Recovered) (2020), was made in the midst of the Corona pandemic, while the artist was in lockdown in China. As so much of Eller’s work, it is a self-portrait, yet at the same time, also an intimate portrait of COVID-19; replicating in its form and content the biological basis of the virus. Eller projects himself into the frame in a visually and aurally layered palimpsest. The artist re-duplicates himself, again and again, with each of his copies reciting the complete genetic code of one of the first strains of the SARS-CoV2 virus identified in Wuhan, where the COVID-19 outbreak began. But Eller makes mistakes in the code, scrambling the RNA sequence here, dropping a nucleotide there…. The artist has translated into visual language an approximation of how the virus replicates itself, spreading its genetic information through multiplication, and through mistakes from copy to copy, mutating to create new strains. While the virus ceaselessly copies itself, we hide from it, and from each other. We distance, socially, and wait for a scientific breakthrough, hoping that science will win this race against nature. We should be so lucky if the virus simply stops, as Eller does, and goes away.

Nina E. Schönefeld, N.O.R.O.C.2.3., 2020

Nina E. Schönefeld’s N.O.R.O.C.2.3 (2020), also made during the Corona lockdown, but in Berlin, is a dark depiction of our current pandemic times, cast in the guise of dystopian science fiction. Drawing on excerpts of her previous work, together with historical quotations, passages from novels, television series, films, political speeches, stock footage, video portraits and media reports from different periods of history, N.O.R.O.C.2.3 is a narrative video collage that takes the pulse of a pandemic in the digital age.

Shingo Yoshida

Moving on from Schönefeld’s sci-fi is Shingo Yoshida’s stark – but equally dystopian – reality. Heathrow Airport: Corona Diary (2020) was shot at the end of April, while the artist was en-route to his native Japan, when many countries worldwide were still in lockdown. Traversing endless escalators and moving walkways from one empty hall to another, the artist glimpses birds flying through deserted terminals, safety announcements made for no one, advertising posters rendered oddly inappropriate in a time of social distancing. This record of an unprecedented present is shown alongside The Summit (2020), another of Yoshida’s recent works. Yoshida’s ghostly journey through an abandoned monument to globalization, is set in contrast to an intergenerational journey to the peak of Japan’s monument to nationhood, as Yoshida brings to life his father’s and grandfather’s dream to place an engraved haiku atop Mount Fuji.

Map Office

The Hong Kong artist duo Map Office embark upon a different kind of personal journey in the midst of this century’s first major viral outbreak, SARS. In Viral Operation (2003), the artists, having flown to Berlin from a Hong Kong still ravaged by the SARS epidemic, proceed on a road trip with the aim of crossing as many European land borders as possible on their way to Italy to show their work in the Venice Biennale. Wearing masks throughout the journey, they are treated continuously as suspect Others, potential contaminants. The mask, in Asia often worn as a social nicety, here becomes a dangerous symbol of contagion. And now, 17 years down the line, when we are all wearing masks and borders between countries remain closed, we look back at Viral Operation as a social experiment, prefiguring what was to come. While in Runscape (2010), Map Office chronicle the kind of freedom of movement which, under our current pandemic conditions, has been denied to many around the globe who have been restricted to lockdown in the interests of public health. The narration describing the body as ‘a bullet which needs no gun’, assumes a newly dark undertone in view of today’s repeated warnings of the deadly spread of the virus from person to person. Running the city to map its portrait and redefine its uses of public space, could equally be an elegy to physical communication through space, a right which most of us took for granted before Corona.

Nezaket Ekici

In her own elegy for the freedoms of travel, On The Way Safety and Luck (2016), Nezaket Ekici reimagines a farewell ritual which was once commonly practiced in Turkey and many Balkan countries, where friends and family gather to throw water after the vehicles of the departed, so that their journey may flow as smoothly as water. Ekici’s radical re-enactment of this custom, seen through the lens of Corona-times, implies a purification more physical than spiritual, as people around the globe are instructed to soak and scrub to disinfect themselves after every journey outdoors. Ekici’s Veiling and Reveiling (2010) can equally be read through the prism of our strange times. Does a burka become the ultimate form of safety gear? In this video performance, Ekici meticulously dresses herself in lingerie and make-up, donned on top of the burka she is wearing. Inverting private and public, she subverts the normative function of the burka, to comic effect. But, if viral ticking time bombs are indeed walking our streets, this practice may start to look like a good idea for everyone.

Shaarbek Amankul

While western medicine has so far failed to find a viable vaccine or cure, it is perhaps time to turn to the ancient shamanistic traditions of other cultures. In Duba (2006) and Sham (2007), Kyrgyz artist Shaarbek Amankul gives us an intimate portrait of cleansing rituals performed by shamans, with the trances, incantations, cries, and grunts, that seem so alien to most of us. Yet in cultures where many still do not trust in science, it can be hoped that faith in alternative forms of healing will safeguard against the ravages of our viral times.

Theo Eshetu, Festival of Sacrifice, 2012

Faith is equally the subject of Theo Eshetu’s Festival of Sacrifice (2012), depicting another ancient cultural tradition, the celebration of Eid-ul-Adha, the Islamic Festival of Sacrifice. Turning the ritual itself into a trance, the video recreates, through its multiplication of images, the kaleidoscopic patterns that highlight the spiritual aspect of the event. Eshetu here manages to create aesthetic beauty from images of ritual slaughter.

Mariana Hahn, Burn My Love, Burn, 2013

In the spirit of finding beauty in suffering, Mariana Hahn conceives her own beautiful ritual of personal sacrifice. In her video performance Burn My Love, Burn (2013), the artist confronts the death of a loved one through a ritual of mourning, consuming the ashes of burnt poetry, numbing her suffering on the frozen ice. The tragic reality of our pandemic times is that countless people around the globe are in mourning for loved ones unfairly taken from them by an invisible killer, as yet poorly understood.

Kate McMillan

Kate McMillan’s Paradise Falls I & II (2011/2012) is a different kind of tribute to the disappeared, to the forgotten sites of distant traumas, to the frailty of personal and historic memory. Drawing parallels between physical and psychological landscapes, McMillan has created moving paintings where ghost-like people flicker in and out of existence, as symbols of fractured and partial histories that disappear from focus, yet can continue in our collective psyche as dark and haunting traumas. Seen now, from the epicenter of our global viral crisis, this begs the question of how, eventually, will we look back upon, and remember, the time of Corona?

Gülsün Karamustafa, Personal Time Quartet, 2000

But while we remain in its midst, Gulsun Karamustafa’s 4-channel video installation and soundscape, Personal Time Quartet (2000), intended as a portrait of the artist’s childhood, instead now paints a picture of how many of us have felt during lockdown, stuck indoors and perpetually repeating the same domestic tasks.

Stefano Cagol, National Pride, 2009

While Stefano Cagol’s National Pride (2009) turns a clip from Virus, a 1980 apocalyptic sci-fi film, into an audiovisual parable for our times. Transforming the filmic pandemic of the Italian Flu into a wider reflection on influenza, influence, and borders, this capricious work fits firmly into Cagol’s ongoing series of FLU projects; a body of work dating back to 1998 and the first Bird Flu outbreak in Asia in 1997.

Sumugan Sivanesan, Children’s Book of War, 2010

Equally capricious is Sumugan Sivanesan’s A Children’s Book of War (2010), which uses the lighthearted visual languages of animation, computer games, and digital media in a jarring conjunction to address the serious topics of war, sovereignty, and violence. As the experience of the outside world has been for many, during lockdown, restricted to their computer screens, Sivanesan’s dense visual collage of cultural references and Australian colonial history becomes that much more topical today in view of Australia having closed its borders for at least another year in order to safeguard itself from the virus. Herein lies the beauty of distance in pandemic times.

Qiu Anxiong, Cake, 2014

In another multi-faceted animated work, Qiu Anxiong’s Cake (2014), combines painting, drawing and clay with a discordant soundtrack of mechanical noises to offer a timeless and exquisitely crafted contemplation on the past, the present, and the relationship between the two. With heart-rate monitors, sirens, and police radio scanners running throughout the soundtrack, and images of wrestlers rendered in a variety of media, this work can be read as particularly emblematic of the struggles of our viral times.

Varvara Shavrova, The Opera. Three Transformations, 2010-16

As an artistic analogy for the dramas of our global crisis, the artform of opera can perhaps best capture the heartaches, the soaring emotions, the uncertainties of daily life, both the lack and the overabundance of information, families torn asunder, jobs in peril, relationships strained, nerves fraying, heroines dying alone in attics, and yes, also the joyous moments, the times of calm, the space for contemplation as the world slows down and the music grows softer. Varvara Shavrova’s The Opera. Three Transformations (2010-2016) takes an intimate look at the performers behind the spectacle and the masque of Chinese opera.

David Krippendorff, Nothing Escapes My Eyes, 2015

So too does David Krippendorff’s Nothing Escapes My Eyes (2015) take us on an intimate journey through identity and history. Krippendorff’s time-warping tribute to a changing world poses a fitting way to round off this exhibition, as a would-be Aida, to a moving soundtrack from the eponymous opera, sheds tears for a place and time which no longer exist. COVID-19 has changed our world forever. It has left gaping holes in the hearts of all those who have lost loved ones. It has impoverished those who were prevented from working, or who had to pay for medical care. Yet it has also witnessed a remarkable outpouring of creativity, good will, and good humor as people around the world try to cope, both in their own ways and communally, with the changing world in the time of Corona. What will be our new normal in post-pandemic times?

Janet Laurence, Vanishing, 2009/10

COVIDecameron ends with the meditative soundtrack of deep breathing, snuffling, purring, rumbling, accompanied visually by close-ups of various animals as they inhale…exhale…inhale…exhale. Its not just us humans – the animal kingdom is also at risk from this pan-species pandemic. Janet Laurence’s Vanishing (2009/10) reminds us what COVID-19 has made so strikingly manifest – the most important thing is to keep breathing.