Daniel Crooks
24 Frames per Second

For 24 Frames Per Sec­ond, Car­riage­works com­mis­sioned chore­o­g­ra­phers, visu­al artists, per­for­mance-mak­ers and film­mak­ers to make 24 new screen-based works. Three years in devel­op­ment, the project was con­ceived to sup­port those artists, both Aus­tralian and inter­na­tion­al, work­ing at the fore­front of exper­i­men­tal, cross-dis­ci­pli­nary prac­tice, often in a col­lab­o­ra­tive mode.

Col­lab­o­ra­tion between the visu­al and per­form­ing arts has a long and rich his­to­ry. Through­out the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, artists fre­quent­ly worked in con­cert with one anoth­er in ways that were more open, entre­pre­neur­ial and recep­tive to exter­nal influ­ence than that of the soli­tary artist with their sin­gu­lar mode of expression.

The bound­aries between artis­tic dis­ci­plines are today more porous than ever. Art­works which syn­er­gise dif­fer­ent media are being co-authored by con­tem­po­rary artists work­ing across and between art forms in an increas­ing­ly organ­ic fash­ion. At the same time, dance and per­for­mance have infil­trat­ed the insti­tu­tion­al spaces of the muse­um, enliven­ing and acti­vat­ing gal­leries pre­vi­ous­ly devot­ed to sta­t­ic objects.

24 Frames Per Sec­ond rep­re­sents a new iter­a­tion of this idea, with the indus­tri­al spaces and mul­ti-arts ethos of Car­riage­works offer­ing a plat­form that exists beyond the white cube, ciné­math­èque, or dance stu­dio. Many of the artists have incor­po­rat­ed the building’s dis­tinc­tive archi­tec­ture into their think­ing, cre­at­ing works that play with scale or that throw the rela­tion­ship between the mov­ing fig­ure and its envi­ron­ment into strik­ing relief.

The works in this exhi­bi­tion embrace an expand­ed notion of dance, with the artists prac­tis­ing embod­ied move­ment in a vari­ety of forms. In sev­er­al works, the cam­era itself becomes a chore­o­graph­ic tool, often devis­ing a duet with the per­form­ers. Oth­er the­mat­ic con­cerns explored in these works include the body’s some­times fraught rela­tion­ship to tech­nol­o­gy, the fig­ure with­in the land­scape, the rela­tion­ship between ver­nac­u­lar dance and mythol­o­gy, the role of move­ment in self-rep­re­sen­ta­tion, inter­ro­ga­tions of the dance film genre, height­ened states of con­scious­ness, and the body in a state of stress or excitation.

An encounter with the works in 24 Frames Per Sec­ond high­lights the exhil­a­rat­ing phys­i­cal­i­ty of dance as it is pre­sent­ed on screen, from indi­vid­ual move­ment to col­lec­tive expres­sion, from endurance to exhaus­tion, from rehearsal to per­for­mance. It also reminds us that artists work­ing togeth­er across dis­ci­plines can reveal com­plex and mul­ti-faceted truths about con­tem­po­rary experience.

Curat­ed by Beat­rice Gral­ton and Nina Miall