Tracey Moffatt - Laudanum

Since her exhibition at the Dia Center for the Arts in New York in 1997/98, Australian artist Tracey Moffatt has been one of the most-watched international artists. Of Aboriginal descent, Moffatt combines the artificial aspects of theater and film with a kinetic documentary approach to achieve highly emotional films and photographic series located on the border between reality and the surreal. Drawing on well-known pictorial styles from film, photography and art history and adopting elements of advertising and trash-TV, Moffatt explores existential themes -- sexuality and power, birth and death, desires, dreams and memories -- as well as Aboriginal related themes concerning the unknown, the outcast, and the marginal. Her visual scenarios are imbued with atmospheric strangeness and contradictory emotions. This book offers a representative selection of her work, including the until now unpublished 1998 series "laudanum".