Tracey Moffatt Doomed

Tracey Moffatt, Doomed 2007, digital video, 10 mins, © Tracey Moffatt 2007

Our worst nightmares! Earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, fire, explosions, tornados! Few screams are heard in this ten-minute video, again compiled by Hillberg to Moffatt's original idea, just a driving techno-beat soundtrack whose momentum rushes us to the end shot where we see what looks suspiciously like the Twin Towers in New York overwhelmed by tsunami. Towards the end are several excerpts from The Day After Tomorrow (Roland Emmerich, 2004): a film that gives us a powerfully visual update on what might happen with "abrupt" climate change.

People die spectacularly, silently, and over and over again in this video. Since we are looking at film, however, and especially because we are looking at the FX (visual effects) industry in film, from the fifties through to the twenty-first century, we know it really isn't happening. The clips are out of context again from their narratives, and to an extent, they look very silly! Are all our fears so silly? The video is full of images of what humans think is the worst that "nature" (and aliens and bad people) can do to us at a catastrophic level. Embedded in the fast-paced humor of this work, though, are visions of dark dreams, and some of them look perilously close to the disasters and tragedies we have recently seen recorded presented to us as news footage. In Doomed, we are confronted with wars we cannot win, but only survive.

Catherine Summerhayes, The Moving Images of Tracey Moffatt, Edizioni Charta, Milano 2007, pp.252-253

Tracey Moffatt, born in Brisbane in 1960, Moffatt studied visual communications at the Queensland College of Art, from which she graduated in 1982. Since her first solo exhibition at the Australian Centre for Photography in Sydney in 1989, she has exhibited extensively in museums all over the world. Represented by Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney.

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Tracey Moffatt

b. 1965, Freetown, Sierra Leone, lives Melbourne, Australia

Tracey Moffatt is a leading contemporary visual artist who works in photography, film and video. Some of Moffatt’s photographs and short films have achieved iconic status in her home country of Australia and Internationally. Born in Brisbane in 1960, Moffatt studied visual communications at the Queensland College of Art, from which she graduated in 1982. Since her first solo exhibition at the Australian Centre for Photography in Sydney in 1989, she has exhibited extensively in museums all over the world. Moffatt first gained significant critical acclaim when her short film Night Cries was selected for official competition at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival. Her first feature film, beDevil, was also selected for Cannes in 1993.

Moffatt was selected for the international section of the 1997 Venice Biennale (curated by Germano Celant) and has also featured in the Biennales of Sydney, Sao Paulo (1998) and Gwangju (1995). A major exhibition at the Dia Center for the Arts in New York in 1997/98 consolidated her international reputation. In 2003 a large retrospective exhibition of Moffatt’s work was held at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney to record breaking attendances and in 2004 at the Hasselblad Museum in Sweden. In 2006, she had her first retrospective exhibition in Italy, at Spazio Oberdan, Milan. In 2007 her photographic series Scarred For Life was exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum and her video LOVE at the Brooklyn Museum in New York. As well in 2007 she was awarded the prestigious Infinity award for art photography selected by an International panel at the International Center of Photography in New York City. Her photographs play with many different printing processes and have a filmic, narrative quality. Tracey Moffat approaches all her work in the media of photography and video as a film director and she is a powerful visual storyteller.