MIŠKA   MANDIĆ

Firstdraft Gallery
4 November - 26 November

Part of the Firstdraft Screening Program: Anthropocene - Embodied Waste

The Fold, 2022
20 minutes

Written, directed and edited: Miška Mandić,
Actors: Luke Bacon, Alia Parker and Chris Nash
Music: Megan Alice Clune, Skeleten and Chris Zabrieske
 

The Fold explores the way objects disrupt our understanding of time through a series of bodily, sensorial and material metaphors. It draws on both science fiction and magic realist tropes to follow a man who is pulled away from a work call by a mysterious voice that repeatedly tells him ‘listen’, driving him further into remote bushland. There he unearths and meets the character of The Orb, which proceeds to shape shift into a series of minerals contained in a standard mobile phone. The story is sometimes interrupted by a muscular, fleshy portal that enables narrative time shifts between materials in different states of folding. These raw materials and landscapes, both interior and exterior, are compared and connected in different ways throughout the film; the atoms of iron in a mobile phone, become the atoms of iron flowing through the fleshy body, become the atoms of iron in a supernova. Each connection is a site of activity, ‘things’ in temporary configurations that point to more complicated and distributed processes and histories. This film continues Miška's cinematic investigations of ‘waste’ (the compounding residues of extractives processes), which confront the banalities of our current ecological emergencies to disrupt entrenched complacencies and provoke new ways of thinking and relating.

Finalist in Fisher’s Ghost Art Prize Campbelltown Art Centre
28 October - 8 December
 

Portals and residues, 2023
9 minutes
Directed and edited: Miška Mandić
Timelapse photography: Miška Mandić
Additional photography: Petra Leslie
Sound design: Luke Bacon

At the centre of a domestic table, an iPhone—concealing dozens of geological minerals behind its smooth exterior—is held by a sedimenting soil from which mushrooms fruit. This ecosystem is energised by a fleshy portal that appears on screen to activate shortcuts that rewire the temporal and spatial distances between figures.