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M+, Hong Kong. Gift of Tracey Moffatt, 2018, © Tracey Moffatt. Image Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney.
On View
Mediatheque
Tracey Moffatt 翠絲．莫法特
Vigil 監察
2017
In this short work, artist Tracey Moffatt combines the disparate worlds of classic Hollywood film and Australia’s refugee crisis. She intercuts movie stills showing a familiar trope—characters gazing through windows or looking through binoculars, reacting to something off-screen—with manipulated news photographs of refugee boats seeking safety on Australian shores. As the real-life imagery grows darker, showing wrecked boats and numerous casualties, the stills grow more dramatic, with characters’ expressions evolving from initial concern to outright horror. As the work nears its end, the ominous soundtrack rises, the pace of the clips increases, and strobe effects build into a tense climax. But in Moffatt’s constructed narrative, the Hollywood stars remain safely behind glass, witnessing terrible suffering but taking no action to relieve it.
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