Tracey Moffatt

Born 1960, Meanjin/Brisbane, Australia
Lives and works Sydney, Australia

Gary Hillberg

Born 1982, Boorloo/Perth, Australia
Lives and works, Naarm/Melbourne, Australia

Museum of Contemporary Art

Doomed, 2007
digital video, HD, colour, sound
10 minutes, loop

Presentation at the 24th Biennale of Sydney was made possible with generous support from a grant from Open Society Foundations
Museum of Contemporary Art, purchased with funds provided by the Coe and Mordant families, 2008
Courtesy the artist, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

A montage of excerpts from Hollywood disaster films, Doomed begins with Marlon Brando’s familiar face, followed by a female voice exclaiming ‘we are doomed, doomed’. This sentiment echoes across the video’s 10 campy minutes of cinematic catastrophe where civilisation is overrun, flooded or burnt in a melodramatic onslaught.

Caught in a perpetual crescendo, Doomed presents calamity not as the end but as a perverse repetition which grows increasingly ridiculous in its replication. This, in combination with occasionally clumsy filmmaking, undermines the endless doomsday proclamations made by the authoritative male characters and their hysterical white female co-stars. In this way, Doomed playfully disrupts the notion that any given crisis should monopolise attention, let alone one that is created by colonial or patriarchal powers.

Ironically, the video’s closing title, ‘The End’, simply signals the return of Brando. Like deer in the headlights of an apocalypse, no forward direction or brighter future can be imagined in the suspended motion of a dying world. The fear of an end, it seems, only upholds the social order which threatened to unleash it.

Tracey Moffatt is one of Australia’s leading contemporary artists. Born in 1960 in Brisbane, Moffatt began her career in the late 1980s – her first solo exhibition was at the Australian Centre of Photography in 1989 – and has since established herself as a pioneering voice in contemporary art, nationally and internationally. Over the past three decades Moffatt has worked predominantly in photography and film and is known as a powerful visual storyteller. The narrative is often implied and self-referential, exploring her own childhood memories, and the broader issues of race, gender, sexuality and identity. 

Read more about the 24th Biennale of Sydney, Ten Thousand Suns, by purchasing the catalogue here.