"Force Majeure" 2016

Wall text

Gabriella Hirst

Born 1990, New South Wales. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany, and London, England. Pronouns: she/her.

"Force Majeure" 2016

single-channel video, 14:50 minutes

Courtesy of the artist. Commissioned by the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), for NEW16, 2016.

Gabriella Hirst’s Force Majeure depicts the artist’s repeated attempts to paint a storm while amid one, and to film these efforts: a twofold critique of plein air and European Romantic landscape representation. As the storm accelerates, the wind prevents Hirst from executing her task, and the rain erases her watercolour images. Force Majeure epitomises the absurdity of trying to capture the vast, dynamic flows of nature within the static pictorial confines of a small, rectangular canvas.

Filmed mostly in the German village of Rügen—a location frequented by British and Australian Impressionist/Realist painters in the 1900s—the region was initially popularised by German Romantic landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) in the 1800s. Rather than conceiving of nature as a backdrop for human activity, Friedrich was renowned for his archetypal imagery of the sublime: the lone, diminutive human figure set against the expansive metaphorical power of the landscape.

Anthropogenic climate change has been described as the new sublime by French theorist and curator Nicolas Bourriaud. In his rethinking of the Romantic concept, climate change is conceptualised as a vast, overwhelming phenomenon that is globally dispersed, evading both comprehension and representation.

Force Majeure lifts its title from Hirst’s commissioning contract for participation in NEW2016, an exhibition at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. Referring to a storm, natural disaster, or act of God that might prevent the artist from completing the work, Force Majeure is a standard legal clause that renders the artist and institution exempt from fulfilling her contractual obligations should such an event occur.

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