James Tylor is included in the 22nd Biennale of Sydney: NIRIN, curated by Brook Andrew, with his work Karta Pintingga The Island of the Dead, 2020.
Karta Pintingga (The Island of the Dead) is a silent mono-chromatic film about Karta Pintingga Kangaroo Island in South Australia. This visually poetic silent film references the Island’s dark human history. The Island has a long Indigenous history dating back over 45,000 years. Since its isolation from the Australian landmass 10,000 years ago, it was uninhabited by people until the arrival of Matthew Flinders in 1802 and European whalers who colonised it between 1803-1836. Karta Pintingga has cultural importance for Kaurna and Ngarrindjeri people. They have dark stories about the Island’s creation and of its colonial history with European whalers kidnapping Indigenous women and holding them captive there. Karta Pintingga is the Kaurna name for Kangaroo Island and it translates to “the Island of the Dead
15 Screens comprises an array of viewing screens across the venues of NIRIN, providing visitors with an alternative network of channels, immediate narratives, fictions, themes and cinematic realities by which to experience the exhibition across Sydney’s vast geography. These screens host a variety of moving image material, from artistic video work, documentary and archival footage, to infomercials, music video clips and short film. Though varied in style, these stand-alone works are united in their expression of critical issues and often marginalised histories that demand our attention.
Scattered across Biennale venues, these screens complicate an experience of each exhibition – they hide, interrupt, and re-route our paths – while also providing a guiding conceptual thread with which to pass through. 15 Screens promises to compliment and synthesise exhibition elements across venues, or conversely to derail one’s trajectory through NIRIN altogether, catapulting us along new tangents of meaning. From within their fixed and various positions, these screens spill over with content, reaching and potentially pulling us out of our rhythm to thrust us into the presence of urgent stories told with sincerity and focus. Collectively, they accentuate a kaleidoscopic effect within NIRIN,at once providing vast and varied perspectives by which to understand multiple stories, as well as the opportunity for close attention on the singular content they display.
