Earth: Ho Tzu Nyen

Overview

Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen gets around. His experimental film Earth — designed to be accompanied live by the music of Yasuhiro Morinaga and Stefano Pilia — has toured the world. It made appearances at the Venice Film Festival and Cannes, and more traditional art shows at Fukuoka and São Paulo. After these exotic excursions, Earth is coming here too, to be part of the Sydney Festival. A kind of painting translated to the page, Earth works in the tradition of Nightwatching or other transitions from canvas to film. Chocolate shades of light and dark are drawn out of Italian tenebroso and into the moving image, in a 45 minute film shot in three long takes on a set made up like a dark rubbish dump.

Designed to sit with a musical score as much as to be projected on a wall, the Woolloomooloo installation of Earth at Artspace has arranged to have the music come to the shadowy art. Melbournite instrumentalist and composer Oren Ambarchi will perform live pieces to accompany the film tonight (Monday 24) and tomorrow at 7.30pm. So if you want to find out what backing music might have pleased Carravaggio, come down to Earth and check out the soundtrack.

*The unaccompanied exhibition runs Tuesday to Sunday