installation / Super8 projections + audio performance through mono speaker
in collaboration with Louise Curham
Ainslie Arts Centre, 28 May 2016
“Eyes half closed, mind wide open. An exploration of what you see when you’re looking sideways.
CANBERRA OBSCURA is a celebration of the ACT’s weirdest sounds and strangest stories. Inspired by the atmosphere and tropes of the Australian Gothic, this event will challenge perceptions of our urban surrounds, and interrupt the everyday with an eerie and unsettling exploration of what lies beneath.” from the AGAC website
For this event, film artist Louise Curham and I decided to play with the ‘Obscura’ theme and create a deconstructed cinema. Using a corridor between the reception hall and the main hall at Ainslie Arts Centre for our playing space, we presented patrons a thoroughfare of moving image that Louise manipulated in real time while I provided a live soundtrack using electric guitar loops, bass tones, programmed rhythms and analog electronics. Patrons were free to engage with the work either as they moved between performances or if they returned to the space during our playing time, like a film on loop in a theatrette.
Shoeb Ahmad 