European Network for Indigenous Australian Rights: news

19 April 2001 - This is an exhibition of two halves: one thrilling, the other less so. On the ground floor, we see one of Tracy Moffatt's best-known works, the film Night Cries, alongside a recent series of large-scale photographic silk screens, Invocations. This juxtaposition works well, showing continuing concerns in the artist's work - the reality and the imaginative dimension of women's lives, filmic dreamworlds as backdrops to politically charged narratives, the interplay between gender, race and culture - and how her practice has changed.

The silk screens are formally more ambitious, almost tacky in their glossy richness of colour, and both melodramatic and terrifying in their iconography. The new work is playful in a way Night Cries is not, with its suffocating narrative of an Aboriginal woman forced to care for the aged white woman who adopted her as a child. Moving from the silk screens to the film and back again, you notice the deeply symbolic and intertextual nature of both works, as well as Moffatt's use of saturated colour and painterly composition.

In the upper gallery, there's no such revealing relationship, largely because of the rather lacklustre arrangement of the work. Two photographic series - Laudanum and Scarred for Life II - need a more intimate space; here they are arranged along two connecting walls, unproductively clashing with each other. Laudanum is a disturbing story, shot in a colonial mansion in Australia, of an Asian servant girl and her Victorian mistress. Shot like a Kate Bush video based on 19th-century photographs, it narrates a tale of submission, sexual violence, domination and finally murder in images that are at once melodramatic and politically charged.

Scarred for Life couldn't be more different: a series of reports from the frontline of suburban life as experienced by Moffatt and her friends growing up in Brisbane. In the style of those Time/Life books from the 1960s, the captions speak of dysfunction, brutality and comic misunderstandings below photographs exuding 1970s bad taste. But this upper gallery lacks atmosphere compared with the dimly lit evocative ground-floor space. Moffatt relies heavily on mood as well as polemic in her work; without it, it's a bit like trying to watch a film in a cinema with the lights up.

Night Cries
A Rural Tragedy
A film by Tracey Moffatt
1990
19 minutes
Color, Video 16mm 35mm

On an isolated, surreal Australian homestead, a middle-aged Aboriginal woman nurses her dying white mother. The adopted daughter’s attentive gestures mask an almost palpable hostility. Their story alludes to the assimilation policy that forced Aboriginal children to be raised in white families. The stark, sensual drama unfolds without dialogue against vivid painted sets as the smooth crooning of an Aboriginal Christian singer provides ironic counterpoint. Moffatt’s first 35mm film displays rare visual assurance and emotional power.

New York Film Festival

Cannes Film Festival

Melbourne Film Festival, Best Australian Film

Montreal Women’s Film Festival, Best Short

Tampere Short Film Festival, Special Jury Award

“A dazzling grand opera of silence and maternity, as opulent as Robert Wilson, as soulfully anguished as Fassbinder.”
Manohla Dargis, Best of 1990,Village Voice

“Unsentimental and self-consciously artificial, the film undermines any easy assumptions or conclusions. Formally innovative and thought-provoking at once.”
Caryn James, New York Times

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Tracy Moffat @ Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh

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