Place Made After the Story

Place Made After the Story
6:30-8pm, 28 February, 2025
6:30pm doors open with refreshments
7pm event starts

A collaboration between Composite (Melbourne) and KADIST, organized by curator Rosemary Forde, alongside Kadist curators Yuan Fuca and Shona Mei Findlay, this screening event brings together a selection of video works from Edwina Green, Eugenia Lim, Kim Munro, Emilija Škarnulyte, Sriwhana Spong, and Ana Vaz. Each work engages with narratives and relational views of place, employing gestures and embodied understandings of place through movement, tactile exploration, text and imagery, to explore the fluid and ongoing process of place-making. 

The artists in Place Made After the Story exhibit a tenderness in approach, bringing a poetic logic to their critical engagement with place. By revisiting public histories or familial memory, these works deal with the intricate relationships between locality, ecology, narrative, belonging and not belonging.

In the colonial construction of Australia, stories of place have often been crafted with legitimising claim-staking intent, based on the foundational myth of an empty land or terra nullius. Both material and imaginative practices were deployed in this project, reflecting the importance of art and literature in the making and remaking of place. While early settler narratives and contemporary civic “placemaking” practices may tend towards the declarative and singular, the artists in Place Made After the Story resist this, offering instead works that weave personal, relational, and ecological understandings into their inquiries. 

Their works do not settle on answers but explore the intimacies of locality and the quiet fractures where stories fail to align. Place is neither static nor singular. It is tactile, embodied, and continuously revised—a becoming rather than a being. Here, the moving image becomes an act of reimagining, of holding the past and future in the same frame. From Australia to Aotearoa, Brazil to Lithuania, these artists trace the edges of what narratives a place might hold when it is revisited over time, when its contours are drawn by memory, movement and materiality. 

Place Made After the Story is part of KADIST’s ongoing international program Double Takes, which activates film and video works through physical and online presentations at partner institutions and on KADIST.tv.

Composite: Moving Image Agency & Media Bank is an Artist-Run agency dedicated to supporting artists’ moving image practices in Australia through exhibition, research, education and distribution. Composite began within a dedicated screening room and production space at the Collingwood Yards and is now located at the Brunswick Mechanics Institute. It works in concert with other organisations, initiatives and festivals to champion artists’ moving image practice in the visual arts to a wide audience and create new income opportunities for individual working artists. Composite hosts a year-round screening program; facilitate screening events, workshops and education programs; build an online database of artists’ video and film works; develop a distribution and licensing model for Australian artists video and film works; and house a Media Bank to provide free loans of technical equipment for artists working with moving image.

KADIST is a non-profit contemporary art organization that believes artists make an important contribution to a progressive society through their artwork, which often addresses key issues relevant to the present day. Dedicated to exhibiting the work of artists—from more than one hundred countries—represented in its collection, KADIST affirms contemporary art’s role within social discourse, and facilitates new connections across cultures. Its local hubs in Paris and San Francisco organize exhibitions, physical and online programs, and host residencies. KADIST stays apprised of developments in contemporary art via a global advisor network, and develops collaborations internationally, including with leading museums, fostering vibrant conversations about contemporary art and society.

Image: 'Eco Binded' Edwina Green 2019-2022