Australian speculative architect, filmmaker and BAFTA-nominated producer Liam Young will stage his first solo Australian exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria.
Young’s work imagines the future of cities through images and animated films that prompt audiences to examine urgent environmental questions.
The exhibition includes the Australian premier of Young’s newest moving image work, The Great Endeavour, which is currently showing at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale.
The work depicts construction infrastructure powered by renewable energy sources, which could be substituted for fossil fuels to prevent vast quantities of greenhouse gases from entering the atmosphere.
Another animated short film, Planet City, will also be on display. Originally commissioned for the NGV Triennial in 2020, the film portrays an imagined city that houses the world’s entire population – 10 billion people – while the remainder of the planet is allowed to regenerate, recover and return to wilderness.
NGV director Tony Ellwood said, “Operating in the space between fact and fiction, Young’s work presents extraordinary visions of an imagined future that aim to inspire real collective action in our present. With a practice spanning moving image, installation and performance art, Young draws on his extensive network of collaborators – including choreographers, costume designers and global think-tanks – to create spectacular imagined worlds that are very much based in the realms of possibility.”
The exhibition also features photographic works and costumes for Young’s cinematic worlds by Ane Crabtree, the acclaimed costume designer of The Handmaid’s Tale.
These displays imagine clothing in both the world of The Great Endeavour and the 10-billion-person metropolis of Planet City. The latter’s workwear was designed to conceal workers’ racial and gender identities: an effort to foster cooperation and overcome cultural and social differences.
“Young’s exhibition speculates that addressing the climate emergency is no longer a technological problem – it is now a social, cultural, and political one. It offers hope that through creativity and collective action, we can move together towards ecological balance on earth,” said NGV senior curator of contemporary art, design and architecture Ewan McEoin.
Source: TourismAfrica2006