Queensland Film Festival’s Aesthetics of Care program—incorporating Love Means Taking Action: Parts 1 and 2—presents works that engage with caring, parenting, and domestic labour. These films not only explore the act of caring but also engage in tender and thoughtful methods of production. The screening will be accompanied by a panel discussion on the relationship between art, work, and the labour of caring with feminist economist Andrea Fox, filmmaker Mia Forrest, author Mary-Rose McCall, and art historian Courtney Pederson.
Kate Davis Weight (2012, 12min)
Taking a 1961 BBC documentary about British modernist artist Barbara Hepworth as its starting point, Weight explores how televised depictions of creativity have constructed our understanding of artistic production and other forms of labour. Courtesy Lux.
Dani Leventhal Restack and Sheila Restack Strangely Ordinary This Devotion (2017, 29min)
A visceral exploration of feral domesticity, queer desire, and fantasy in a world under the threat of climate change. Courtesy VDB.
Margaret Salmon Housework (2014, 6min)
Highlighting the current state of female domestic roles as well as the status of women in larger society, Housework portrays daily chores being completed by themselves as a supernatural phenomenon. Courtesy Lux.
Rosalind Nashashibi Vivian’s Garden (2017, 30min)
Vivian Suter and her mother Elisabeth Wild are Swiss Austrian artists in living in Panajachel, Guatemala, where they have developed a matriarchal compound in an environment that offers both refuge and terror. Vivian’s Garden takes a close and dreamy look at their artistic, emotional and economic lives amongst their extended household. Courtesy Lux.
Valérie Massadian Precious (2012, 4min)
‘Stephen Dwoskin was making his last film. He knew, after struggling his whole life, that this time the end was really coming … He asked a few friends to send him a shot, a sound, a photograph, whatever we wanted, somehow like a farewell gift, that he would use or not in the film. This is what we sent.’—Valérie Massadian.
Love Means Taking Action: Part 2 will screen at the IMA on Thursday 16 August.
