Contemplating the end of the world

Its new project launching for Coastal Currents will run across the three festival weekends.

Co-founders Sharon Haward and Sarah Locke will consider an ‘end of the world’ scenario – will it all end in a bang, slowly fizzle out in a haze of smouldering and toxic debris or be swept away by alien weather systems while we sit watching TV?

Along with other selected artists, they will invite audiences to contemplate their own theories while viewing specially created installations, moving image work and performance pieces.

The theme of ‘end of the world’ provides scope for the artists to respond to existing questions around expanding shanty towns and nomadic populations; a nostalgic vision of a future characterised by heaps of redundant products and technologies; ever expanding populations in relation to shrinking resources, all linked to the popular notion, related to the Mayan calendar, that the world will end on December 21, 2012.

Sarah Locke casts a nostalgic eye over aging and defunct technologies creating a sound installation that provokes a sense of longing for the recent past.

Sharon Haward responds to cataclysmic weather conditions and a world order characterised by chaos and disorder, while Scott Robertson reflects on the nature of labour expended on work that says nothing through an intricate and detailed drawing installation.

Matt Littlemore explores digital technologies through sampling, remix, collage and code to create a childlike vision of the future, and Matthew Pountney and Johnny Crump’s audio-visual ‘mash-up’ pulls viewers into an intensely hypnotic and at times nightmarish world.