Everything Falls Apart, Part I

Everything Falls Apart brings together several significant works by international and Australian artists presented over two exhibitions. Overall, the project focuses on works examining the collapse of ideological and political systems – actual, imagined, desired – be this via specific events or through broader consideration of the dissolution of, or confrontation with, capitalist, colonial, communist or totalitarian regimes. The works often draw on existing footage, personal recollection and reconstitution, and form around relationships between the individual and the mass felt or articulated through interwoven conversation, testimony and narrative.

Part I clusters work that acts as reflective analysis in and of the aftermath of system disintegration, including ecological and cultural belief systems. With an emphasis upon video work, woven together by new installation interventions, common threads connecting these distinct works become apparent: failings of the state, crumbling ideologies, dissolving authoritative measures of control, the generative energies and collective impulses of anti-institutional collective cultural and social identity, the failings of history as both efficacious event narrative and discursive form, the individual as both the subject of and counterforce to the dominance of the mass.