DOOMED (Installation View)

Tracey Moffatt’s video collage, DOOMED (2007), at the Government college of Fine Arts during Chennai Photo Biennale 2019. It features depictions of doom and destruction – war, violence and terror – as they appear in cinema, one of our entertainment options. In collaboration with Gary Hillberg, DOOMED comprises cut-and paste editing techniques in a highly entertaining and black-humorous take on the bleak side of our current psychological landscape. Moffatt’s film looks at both entirely fictional and reconstructed disastrous events. Each scene carries a particular cargo of references. They occupy their own unique symbolism and filmic territory – the poignant, sublime and epic, the tragic, the B-grade and downright trashy. The accumulation of scenes, however, within Moffatt’s own essaying, creates a narrative whole comprised of parts. Not only does Moffatt play within the ‘disaster’ genre, re-presenting representations, she revels in it. Moffatt points at how the viewer is involved in filmic narratives through the emotionally hook, by the promise of imminent disaster, an important narrative device.