A L E X G A W R O N S K I

Happy Hour, Superdeluxe (Japan), the Biennale of Sydney,  Artspace, 2010

SD video (Mini-dv) 7:38

curated by Scott Donovan

Video produced for ‘Happy Hour’, curated by Scott Donovan for the Superdeluxe (Japan) residency at Artspace, during the Biennale of Sydney 2010. The work intersperses footage filmed during a 2005 University of Sydney, Power Residency at the Cité des arts, Paris, and scenes of the demolition of buildings on the University of Sydney main campus. Text overlain paraphrases a section of Guy Debord’s, ‘Society of the Spectacle’: here the endless circulatory aspect of contemporary capitalism is reiterated in constant flows of traffic; echoed in the clumsy yet quasi-balletic motion of the earth movers, is the corresponding cyclical necessity for destruction and redevelopment. This further connects to capitalism’s structural demand for infinite investment and expansion, an impossible and impossibly destructive imperative: everything circulates yet everything stays as it is.