Approach to Mundi Mundi

videography: Gotaro Uematsu

photography: Josh Raymond

Shaun Gladwell’s video works are predominantly concerned with movement, usually in urban spaces. More recently, however, he has extended his practice into a consideration of landscape and place while retaining his core interest in the movement of bodies through space. A spellbinding sense of quietude permeates his work.

‘Approach to Mundi Mundi’ is part of the ‘MADDESTMAXIMVS’ series – an ongoing body of work that has been presented in various arrangements, including at the 2009 Venice Biennale. In ‘Approach to Mundi Mundi’ a faceless motorbike rider, clad in black leather, travels along the white lines of a highway descending into a barren Australian desert. The composition is radically divided by an unbroken horizon line and vertically segmented by the rider’s upright Christ-like position. Poised on the bike with outstretched arms, he appears to embrace the land before him, his stillness demonstrating a heightened sense of bodily awareness and concentration. Paradoxically moving yet also still, this work figuratively ‘swallows’ time, presenting a type of extended moment.