MCA Australia presents Ultra Unreal New myths for new worlds

Inspired by their Filipinx heritage and shared connection to Sydney’s queer performance and nightclub scene, Sydney-based artists Bhenji Ra and Justin Shoulder formed Club Ate in 2014 to collapse boundaries between “art, club, community, dance, and politics”. The Club Ate collective is building a fictional universe that expands on Filipino mythology to create new narratives of motherhood and sisterhood. Working across video, performance, sculpture, costume, installation, and club events, they invoke ancestral beings and landscapes to ask the question “In the face of an uncertain future, how do we, as queer communities of colour, cultivate hope and create possibility?”

Korakrit Arunanondchai’s art practice interweaves performance, painting, video, sculpture, and installation to create an expanding cosmology that he has been building for more than ten years. Based in storytelling and ritual, his work explores the interconnectedness of things, remixing personal, spiritual, and historical tales to imagine new relationships between beings and knowledge systems across time. His sprawling video epic Painting with history in a room filled with people with funny names (2012–) now in its fifth iteration, is made from a growing archive of materials the artist revisits for each new chapter. Arunanondchai has several long-term collaborators on these projects including artist and cinematographer Alex Gvojic, and performer Tosh Basco, who appears as the Naga, a recurring character inspired by a mythological serpent that can take human form.

London-based artist and musician, Lawrence Lek draws on his background in architecture, using gaming software and computer-generated imagery (CGI) to create artificial worlds. Lek’s worlds are populated with dreamers—from sentient weather satellites that dream of being artists, to fading AI popstars that dream of being famous again, all of them searching for autonomy, meaning and connection in a future dominated by data and the algorithmic analysis of human behaviour. Lek is currently developing a Sinofuturist cinematic universe, a series of films, installations, games, and soundtracks that explore tales of geopolitics and technology, and “the strange and turbulent beauty of the world to come”.

Shanghai-based artist Lu Yang has an ongoing fascination with mind-bending technologies and the neuro-physiological basis of consciousness. He has collaborated with scientists, psychologists, music producers, designers, robotics companies and pop stars to create his kaleidoscopic work, which incorporates a growing range of media including 3D-animations, games, dance, motion capture, fashion, performance, painting and sprawling installations of printed murals and LED displays. Merging Buddhist thought and iconography, pop culture, neuroscience and biology in his work, Lu tackles questions of life, death and rebirth, asking viewers to contemplate whether consciousness can be manufactured and sustained beyond the life of the individual. His DOKU series is named after the phrase Dokusho Dokushi meaning “we are born alone, and we die alone”, and features a digital reincarnation of Lu Yang in a parallel universe.

Tokyo-based artist Saeborg describes themselves as “an imperfect cyborg – half human, half toy”. Their work emerged out of the queer club scene in Tokyo, each piece beginning as a costume for Department H, a nightclub and fetish party that has been running in the city since the early 1990s. Saeborg creates inflatable worlds of latex, nightmarish and cute configurations that are stages for large toy-like creatures to perform mythical fables of life and death. Saeborg’s aim in making these works, is “to transcend gender” and to move beyond the restrictions of human bodies to escape strict gender roles in Japanese culture. Using livestock and insects as analogies for society’s expectations and treatment of women, Saeborg creates worlds that are inhabited by creatures that “humans consider the basest of our ecosystem”.