The Museum of Modern Art will make films by Australian artist Nicolas Mangan available this Sunday, May 3. The screenings will take place as part of the ongoing online exhibition "The Age of Half Shadows. Art in a Time of Planetary Change." Ahead are the records of an artistic investigation!
On May 3, 2020, at 12:00 pm, three videos by Nicholas Mangan will be presented on MSN 's YouTube channel. Each is part of larger, elaborate projects based on archival research and artistic investigation.
"Progress in Action"
The film was created as a tribute to the Bougainville Revolutionary Army, which fought from 1988 to 1998 for the independence of Bougainville, a province of Papua New Guinea. The islanders, cut off from energy and food sources during the armed conflict, developed their own engineering solutions, producing, for example, their own bio-fuel from coconuts. The war on the island was led by an aggressive policy of natural resource extraction and the establishment of the Panguna copper mine on land belonging to the indigenous population.
"Nauru - notes from the world of chalk".
In the film, Mangan traces the history of coral limestone cones transported from the island of Nauru to Melbourne as decoration for the skyscraper Nauru House, built in 1977. The building was a symbol of the wealth of this small country, whose main source of income was phosphate mines, mined for fertilizer production. This industry led to the devastation of the environment and the collapse of agriculture on the island.
"Limits to Growth - a numismatic study of dead and dying currencies".
The film is based on a comparison of two currencies: the modern cryptocurrency bitcoin and rai stones, used in the past as a means of payment by the indigenous people of the Yap Islands in the Carolinian archipelago. While bitcoins are virtual, rai were stone disks of enormous size that weighed several tons. The rai disks remained in one place, only their owners changed. The value of a single coin depended, among other things, on the number of people who died during its production.
The film screening will be preceded by a lecture by the director. The link to the broadcast will be provided soon! Follow the event on the MSN website.
