Malena Szlam

Malena Szlam’s magnificent follow-up to Lunar Almanac employs superimpositions and other effects to recast the lakes, salt flats, and volcanic deserts of Northern Chile and Northwest Argentina as psychedelic, otherworldly landscapes.Read More »

SYNOPSIS
Lunar Almanac traces the observational points of the lunar cycle in a series of visual notations. Using single-frame and long-exposure photography, the unaltered, in-camera editing accumulates over 4000 layered field views of half-moons, new moons, and full moons. These lunar inscriptions flit across the screen with a frenetic energy, illuminating nocturnal reveries that pull at the tides as much as our dreams.Read More »

A circumlocutory study of Mount Merapi, Indonesia. Shifting back and forth around the volcano, MERAPI is marked by the silent presence of its rumble and lava. Almost always at the centre, the volcano often slips away behind the clouds, a ghost. The work is silently structured around the rippling impression of the volcano on its surrounds: smoke through trees, the breaking of rain against its slopes and the rich fertility of its soils. A work as sensitive to the shift in light through swirls of 16mm grain and atmosphere as it is to what it is like to live within the horizon of the volcano, located near the densely populated Yogyakarta.Read More »

Light breaks the darkness in playful rapture.Read More »

Storyline
Chronogram is a photomontage that explores stillness, motion, and memory. Using a 35mm still camera, multiple exposures were composed and edited in-camera, creating frameless sequences of images printed on 35mm filmstrips. When projected, these images become a non-linear, non-synchronized collage. The ephemeral quality of the images-their transparency, layering, and repetition-invites us to reflect on the role memory plays in perception, the ways we mentally reconfigure fragments to construct stability and meaning in an environment of perpetual flux. – by Malena SzlamRead More »

“Archipelago of Earthen Bones – To Bunya” forms part of a film constellation that stretches across the Pacific, from Chile to Australia. Malena Szlam trains her camera on far-flung volcanic landscapes, by turns barren and verdant. The dazzling in-camera multiple exposures of the film evoke the layered histories of Mount Beerwah to the titular Bunya Mountains, tracing a path along the central eastern ranges of Australia, which were illuminated in the afterglow of Hunga-Tonga-Hunga-Ha’apai eruption. The film’s environmental evocations are further deepened by field recordings and sonified atmospheres from artist Lawrence English. —Malena SzlamRead More »