Films From Non-Existent in the Everyday World?  Mark Williams · September 2012

Recently installed at Jonathan Smart's new suburban space in Linwood, Christchurch, Et Al's Films from non-existent in the everyday world? offers alternately chilling, jarring and absurd reflections on dispossession and personal dislocatio ... On the wall, a series of broadsheet style posters variously combined diagrammatic motifs with text. While some brandished the weight of a masthead or historical treatise—"The Mule News", "The Colonial Empire", "The Colonial Territories"—others read as scrawled parodies of Life and Style supplements: "purified life section", "thought of life section", "composite happiness." An architectural floorplan for government-devised aboriginal house (or "moietie"), was sketched in masking tape on the gallery floor, suggesting less an ideal for living than a strategy for containment.The dominant media of the show were two moving image works transferred from celluloid to video, labelled pragmatically as Film 1 and Film 2. Film 1 (2012) adopts the motif of the overhead projector-assisted lecture: diagrammatic models laid over aerial views of desert settlement are complimented by a roving pencil which emerges from outside the frame to direct the viewers attention to the various details; outlining, we presume, proposed interventions in the landscape. The references are clearly to Israel and Palestine, and we see images of the 500-mile wall that separates the two countries in the West Bank.

continued - https://www.circuit.org.nz/writing-and-podcast/et-al-films-from-non-existent-in-the-everyday-world-jonathan-smart-gallery-christchurch-aug-18