SHIMURABROS: SEKILALA

PICA is pleased to present the first Australian showing of work by Yuka and Kentaro Shimura, a Japanese brother and sister artistic duo that work together as SHIMURABROS.

Their award winning multi-screen video installation Sekilala will open in the PICA Screen Space on Friday 10 September.

SHIMURABROS are well known in Japan and across Asia and Europe for their inventive and pioneering approach to the motion picture. In the past they have created high-tech installations that allow viewers to imagine what it might have been like to experience the first moving picture over a century ago.

Their much-celebrated work X-Ray Train – Lumiere Bros. to Shimurabros. (2008), which references both the Lumiere Brothers Arrival of a Train at La Coitat and the invention of the x-ray, saw them scan a model locomotive through a medical CT scanner and project the slices onto multiple parallel screens.

With Sekilala (2006-2008), the work to be shown at PICA, the SHIMURABROS have taken their interest in the motion picture into a new realm by extending film beyond its two-dimensional limitations and employing advanced 3D technology and virtual reality programming.

Sekilala, is a three-screen immersive video installation, shot on super 16mm, filmed in Prague and with a storyline inspired by the controversial image of a mouse with what appears to be a human ear growing on its back. A family drama in which the father is obsessed with bio-furniture erratically unfolds in multiple, fractured stories. Projected onto three screens and randomly configured in twenty-six short sequences, the same story is never experienced twice, and the viewer becomes the editor of an infinite and complex film.

The SHIMURABROS recently received the Excellence prize for this work at the 13th Japan Media Arts Festival 2009. Sekilala has also been shown this year at the The National Arts Center Tokyo and at Transgenesis (Czech Academy of Science) as well as at the Cannes International Film Festival in 2007.

SEKILALA will be in the Screen Space at PICA from
11 September–24 October 2010

Talk: Saturday, 2 October, 1pm
Tania Visosevic, Lecturer at Edith Cowan University, will discuss the artists and this controversial work in the context of cinema and Bio Art.