Working across video, audio, photography, and performance, Laresa Kosloff is concerned with the human body and notions of agency in everyday life. Capital presents three of the artist’s video works made using stock footage sourced from the internet.
Originally designed for corporate training and promotional purposes, this footage was made to be malleable, with the potential to help tell different stories. Kosloff edits it to her own professional-voiceover narratives—fanciful accounts of corporate duplicity, neoliberal collapse, and climate crisis—imbuing it with new, unsettling meanings. She calls this ‘political ventriloquism’.
In La Perruque (2019), an errant office worker writes a novel while at work, imagining his co-workers to be characters in his fantastical narrative. In Radical Acts (2020), climate scientists clandestinely distribute a pathogen that renders corporate workers less productive and more susceptible to non-profit motivations. In New Futures™ (2021), a war is waged between industrious, hyper-charismatic ‘synthetic’ personalities tailored for commercial success and disgruntled hackers nostalgic for an apathetic past.
Kosloff’s fables explicitly tell tales of resistance, while implicitly questioning representation in the public realm.
On view from 9 September–16 December 2023 at the Institute of Modern Art. Open Tuesday–Saturday, 10am–5pm, and Thursday, 10am–8pm. For more information visit ima.org.au.
