My Little Gem

This film can be experienced via mobile phone, Google Box or standalone VR headsets. Use headphones for the best audio quality. Ensure the resolution settings are 360 and 4K for best quality viewing.

My little gem

This 360 VR work was made by Kantanka in 2019/20 as part of a Creative Development of new VR works, supported by Create NSW (through the 360 Vision fund).

An Island Paradise, Weekend Disco Parties, Gossiping Aunties and a Cute Bedtime Story. A Father reminisces about his upbringing in a Indian family and how it has shaped his relationship with his daughter. A story of what it means to be a father and what the next generation decides to pass on their kids.

Writer: Rajan Velu
Father: Rajan Velu
Girl: Lakshmi Thangavelu
Director: Carlos Gomes
Editing/Post Production: Sam James
Music Composer: Gail Priest

Produced by Theater Kantanka

This project was supported by
Create NSW 
Blacktown Arts

Theatre kantanka & Rajan Velu Collaboration 2020/21

Lenticular Realities

This film can be experienced via mobile phone, Google Box or standalone VR headsets. Use headphones for the best audio quality. Ensure the resolution settings are 360 and 4K for best quality viewing.

LENTICULAR REALITIES

This 360 VR work was made by Kantanka in 2019/20 as part of a Creative Development of new VR works, supported by Create NSW (through the 360 Vision fund).

Step into the street and gardens of Lenticular Realities. Alissar Chidiac, Bint at Khayat, remembering small stories, openning bigger ones. A personal detail, a physical place, a texture fabric.

Expanding and abstracting and disappearing. After hearing Ghassan Hage speak of lenticular reality as "the diaspora experience of being in the realm of more than one place at the same time - imagining a space of woven light, tatreez warp and welt, intersecting multiple situatedness with temporal trajectories.Family heritage intersection with our sites of contemporary political cultural heritage. Gadigal. Redfern. Tarabulus. Dharug. Burramatta. Granville.

Beyond dualities to multiple identities, layering herstories within locations.

Mundane streets with potent intersections. 

A challenge 360 storytelling, can I collage and merge all these realms?

A challenge of now. the present tense, what is my voice, a woman in her sixties?

Stepping into myself. Stepping into suits and sites of lenticular realities.

Writer/Performer: Alissar Chidiac
Directro: Carlos Gomes
Editing/Post Production: Sam James
Music Composition: Gail Priest

This project was supported by
Create NSW
Australia Council for the Arts
Blacktown Arts

Thanks to:
Micheal
The Prophet Restaurant on 274 Cleveland Street
Arab Theatre Studio
Ghassan Hage's concept
My family ancestry in Redfern on Cadigal Land, especially Antoun and May Chidiac

Tailor

This film can be experienced via mobile phone, Google Box or standalone VR headsets. Use headphones for the best audio quality. Ensure the resolution settings are 360 and 4K for best quality viewing.

Tailor

This 360 VR work was made by Kantanka in 2019/20 as part of a Creative Development of new VR works, supported by Create NSW (through the 360 Vision Fund).
This film explores the art of tailoring, and its impact on the life of an immigrant tailor in Australia, as seen through the eyes of his daughter.

Director: Carlos Gomes
Video Artist: Sam James
Sound Composer: Gail Priest
Narrator/Performer: Katia Molino
Writer: Katia Molino
Animation: Carlos Gomes

Supported by Create NSW and Blacktown Arts Centre.

Garden

This film can be experienced via mobile phone, Google Box or standalone VR headsets. Use headphones for the best audio quality. Ensure the resolution settings are 360 and 4K for best quality viewing.

Garden

This 360 VR work was made by Kantanka in 2019/20 as part of a Creative Development of new VR works, supported by Create NSW (through the 360 Vision fund). ‘Garden’ was created in collaboration with artists from the Greek diaspora living in Sydney, Australia.

Immersing its audience in the garden, this film experience explores the themes of migration, adaptation, cultural memory and the power of family history.

Director: Carlos Gomes
Video Artist: Sam James
Sound Composer: Gail Priest
Narrator: Arky Michael
Writer: Lina Kastoumis
Garden Design: Katia Molino
Stop Motion Animation: Carlos Gomes

Supported by Create NSW and Blacktown Arts Centre.

Latai Taumopeau

This film can be experienced via mobile phone, Google Box or standalone VR headsets. Use headphones for the best audio quality. Ensure the resolution settings are 360 and 4K for best quality viewing.

LAU MANU

Lau manu is a digital fresco of a prophetic vision; when the wounded sky and sea swallowed one another and only the fragile essence of a being remained.  In the not-so-distant gaze into the horizon they work and perform customs from the old world seeking the survival of the ancient song birds for future assurance of the continent. The unforeseeable healing is at an unprecedented stand still.  

Lau manu means birds, plural in my indigenous language of Tongan. In this work I want to poetically identify the power of birds in Oceania as spiritual and visceral guides in the anthropogenic ecocide. 

This project was supported by

Australia Council for the Arts – Resilience Grant.

Create NSW – Arts Rescue & Restart funding

Blacktown Arts

WeiZen Ho

This film can be experienced via mobile phone, Google Box or standalone VR headsets. Use headphones for the best audio quality. Ensure the resolution settings are 360 and 4K for best quality viewing.

The Invisibles

My home is nestled between Katoomba and Leura. I was inspired (like many) during the lockdown period to find new walks in the Blue Mountains national park, that I could do literally by placing my foot beyond the doorstep. I also wanted the experience of regularly repeating walking routes, until they were so familiar that my home space had the possibility of extending into the forest. I attempted to search with my body, the energy and form of the images I had for The Invisibles, on the sandstone rock landscapes, amidst the eucalypts, ferns and black cockatoos. This experience has added a layer of intimacy in my connection to the country of the Gundangurra and Darug people, in which my family and I live on.

WeiZen Ho 2020

Carlos Gomes and Katia Molino

This film can be experienced via mobile phone, Google Box or standalone VR headsets. Use headphones for the best audio quality. Ensure the resolution settings are 360 and 4K for best quality viewing.

The Moth and The Bat


A Cautionary Tale from the Pandemic.

The lockdown was an opportunity to try to make sense of the message that Nature is trying to send us. I noticed that most of the bushwalks around my suburb of Earlwood were taken over by increasing numbers of people, escaping their homes, seeking to connect with nature. What exactly were they seeking? The reserve at Wolli Creek is home to a large number of species. This work was inspired by the creature and the plants I see there.

There is always a dilemma…. how should humans negotiate their space in Nature? What happens when the balance in this relationship is disturbed? We never seem to learn. Nature gives, but she takes back!

Carlos Gomes 2020

Alan Schacher

This film can be experienced via mobile phone, Google Box or standalone VR headsets. Use headphones for the best audio quality. Ensure the resolution settings are 360 and 4K for best quality viewing.

All of a flutter

When presented with the opportunity to create 360 degree video I thought of a circular tower of paper, so I would be surrounded on all sides. The reference is to Borges’ “The Tower of Babel.”

Inspired by artists Boris Nieslony, Mike Parr and  Richard Serra, I have made several performances in which I use reams of either black or white A4 paper.

In this video the paper does not represent the life of an office worker or administrator, but rather the more Kafkaesque image of a man overwhelmed both by paper’s materiality and by its implications: responsibility, authority, obligations, and the impossibility of a truly blank page.

Allan Schacher 2020

Rakini Devi

This film can be experienced via mobile phone, Google Box or standalone VR headsets. Use headphones for the best audio quality. Ensure the resolution settings are 360 and 4K for best quality viewing.

Kali Madonna, a post- pandemic Goddess.

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to reflect on their past, and imagine the aftermath. We have entered a portal, a parallel universe, between one world, the known past, and the world of the unknown future. Imagination and transformation are keywords in this pandemic-effected work that seems timelier than ever. The apocalyptic nature of events unfolding over the pandemic led to the concept of this work.

For centuries the religious iconographies of the Madonna and the Goddess Kali have shaped the spiritual and social construct of Catholic and Hindu societies. As Kali Madonna, a composite of hybrid iconographies, I am both artist and sacred art, drawing the audience through a mythical portal inhabited by the "terrible divine feminine" - the monstrous female who incorporates birth and death, giver of life and slayer of ignorance. The body becomes a conduit for transformation through ritual, dance, and embodiment, as you, the virtual pilgrim, travel through sacred terrain to worship at the inner sanctum of Kali Madonna, the post-apocalyptic Goddess.
Rakini Devi 2020

 

Pandemic and Performance

For this project Kantanka invited a number of artists to develop a performance for a Virtual Reality film, responding to the societal impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In collaboration with KANTANKA each artist has created a short work that responds to COVID-19, its origins, its impact on human behaviour and the environment, and the future possibilities for a world post-pandemic. What thoughts and questions emerged during this period of forced isolation? What did you make of “suspended time” during the lockdown, the sense of crisis as the pandemic emerged? What is your desire for a new future post-pandemic?