Last days of Batteries Not Included

Batteries Not Included
Australian Centre of Photography
257 Oxford Street, Paddington
Finishes Thursday 7th March



Curated by Joseph Allen and Malcolm Smith
Ben Barretto
Martin Bell
The Changes**
Marley Dawson
Ross Manning
Spat + Loogie
Paul Winkler
& Jonathan Zawada

Environments that encourage experimentation and risk-taking are often where the most interesting new ideas can be found. In these spaces, unlikely unions produce curious crossbreeds that defy easy classification.

Batteries Not Included at the Australian Centre for Photography presents the work of 12 artists investigating the hybrid offspring of photomedia; splicing photography with performance, reanimating found images or mechanising the moving image.

With backgrounds and influences as diverse as fashion, street culture, education, new and old technologies and telemarketing, the artists in this exhibition come from the fringes of contemporary visual art practice. With their appetite for risk-taking, experimentalism and disregard of convention, this selection of artists combines the fresh and energetic work of emerging artists with the ground-breaking work of legendary avant guard filmmaker Paul Winkler.

**The Changes are Roland Korg, Boohoo Haha, Aries Overload, and Vertical Doorway. To those who don’t know these names as yet think of Misha Hollenbach and Shauna T, better known as P.A.M - Perks& Mini from Melbourne, Fergus Purcell from London, better known as Fergadelic, and Sk8thing from Tokyo.

After gigs in Milan, Tokyo, and Los Angeles, their overpowering image concert is a mixture between a psychedelic campfire and a mysterious advertising pillar. From backgrounds in fashion, graphic design, pop, and art, the four band members have for a couple of years now applied themselves with sincere commitment and boundless passion for association to the magic of the autodidactic underground. In their interventions, the influence of and the experience with the CULTural explosions of the 80s and 90s - rave, metal, acid, punk, freak-out, rainbow, black, silver, gold, latex, leather, and denim - merge into a redefinition of the present, a joyful, comic explosion, pulsating with energy and positivism.