Unseen Forces

Unseen forces presents the work of six Australian contemporary artists to question how over the last two hundred years human life has become increasingly ordered by instruments of force.

Instead of using our bodies as powerful agents of being in the world we are letting go of physiological knowledge. This abandonment is a political act, even if an unintentional one. In the age of global information nothing of the earth is outside of what is owned and orchestrated by multinational corporations and governments. We see this in simple daily interactions with agencies like weather monitoring systems, which are naively thought to offer a public service. Only, like privately owned news groups, the stakeholders of time, pressure and money manufacture a false set of relations to the world.

The information age is rife with the unseen and we are content to know nothing of its procedures because it is comforting to be divested of the terrifying responsibility of knowing ourselves in the natural world. Like time, pressure and change, the forces beyond our control are too great to fathom. The six artists in this exhibition tackle the crisis of force, confronting in varying modes the assumptions that disembody our contemporary relation to physiological power. In bringing attention to the way we inhabit, intuit and change the world around us Denis Beaubois, Lauren Brincat, Laresa Kosloff, Alex Martinis Roe, Jacky Redgate, and Kiron Robinson offer a way to redress our loss of bodily authority.

In A complex collapse, 2010, Denis Beaubois demonstrates how unseen forces can be made apparent. This video work is “derived from over 400 hrs of recording the brewing of beer in different stages. In Beaubois’s words, “They explore and imagine the loss of control that comes from a gradual molecular change (that occurs within sealed fermenting bodies), and document the tension between what bubbles away under the surface and what remains unchanged on the exterior.”