ON RECORD

2-channel video work

In their experimental performance and film work Anna Breckon and Nat Randall bring an analysis of the event, as a rupture in our everyday experience of the world. We can think of mass protests, political assassinations, bushfires and floods, but with B & R the event takes shape in subtle ticks, gestures and uncanny repetition. 

Harold Holt’s disappearance at Cheviot Beach was the largest televised news event in Australian history. Operating under the guise of disembodied impartiality, the news apparatus orients experience through restrictive notions of knowledge, history and truth. The television news works to produce a spectacle out of an event, registering the political as something from a distance to be looked upon rather than a project of collective active participation. B & R reenact clips from this media archive, translating them through a campy cinematic style that emphasises the materiality of event, being and environment.

In the bunkers at Cheviot Hill, Monmar, Breckon and Randall take us back to December 1967, inviting us to reflect on the affective logics of historical record, monument and news event.