By MICHELE HEWITSON
A white woman clasps an Aboriginal baby in a dilapidated room. Outside the window, three nuns lurk with unknown intent. A tribe of female car wreckers take to old car bodies with sledgehammers. Two men wrestle and writhe in the dust of the Australian Outback.
Like photographs of bad dreams, Up In the Sky is by Australian photographer Tracey Moffatt, whose strange sequences linger as disturbing, half-understood memories. Up In the Sky, a 1997 series, and Heaven a video work made the same year, are soon on show in Auckland.
Moffatt's work is known for its skew-whiff take on gender, class and the politics of race. Up In the Sky can be read in different ways: as a reference to the stolen generation of Aboriginal children (Moffatt is an Aborigine brought up in a white foster family); as a story about disputed paternity.
Heaven, shot at Bondi Beach, looks like a home video: Aussie surfers changing in and out of their swimming gear, behind cars, under towels.
It is a voyeuristic take on a male ritual.The sculpted blokes are subjected to a reversal of the natural order of the beach where boys perve at girls. Moffatt coaxes and challenges the men to give the camera a flash - some oblige, others respond with aggression, others flee. There are conversations on the tape that Moffatt has replaced with a soundtrack of waves crashing, men chanting, the sound of Tibetan drumming. The men are reduced to figures in somebody else's film.
The last frames show Moffatt stepping in frame, attempting to undo the towel of a surfer. So everyone knows who's boss.
"You could call Heaven a revenge film," Moffatt has said, "but I would call it a comedy. Most straight guys hate it. But I didn't make it for men - I made it for all the women who like to look."
* Works by Tracey Moffatt are at Artspace, 300 Karangahape Rd from February 9 until March 4.
Weird scenes and Outback stories
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