RMIT Gallery's current exhibition Agent Bodies questions the various ways that contemporary creative practices engage with human agency, performance, identity, and the body.

In this Art and Design Salon, join Agent Bodies curators, Mikala Dwyer and Drew Pettifer, for a screening of Philip Brophy's 1993 Australian satirical horror Body Melt.

The feature will be supported with two exclusive artwork screenings by RMIT PhD candidates Mig Dann and Daniel R. Marks. Each video work ponders the permeability of bodies, trauma and the corporeal excess, reflecting on various states of bodily integrity as explored in RMIT Gallery’s current exhibition Agent Bodies.

As Andrew Peirce reflects on Body Melt, these considerations have taken on renewed relevance in the contemporary moment:

“Philip Brophy’s Body Melt is easily the most gloriously gruesome, maddeningly moist, furiously filthy, and despicably disgusting Australian film ever. When you title your film Body Melt, well, you better deliver some melted bodies, and sure enough, Brophy doesn’t disappoint. With Covid-19 currently wreaking havoc on the world, this is film that’ll ratchet your germ-phobic anxieties to eleven and will have you reaching for that handwash immediately. Spew, spit, collapsing bodies, blood, guts, a Daddo brother, and pulsing eyeballs, all mix up together in a blender to make this an excellent pink-tinged-horror-smoothie of a film that’ll leave your stomach doing backflips.” thecurb.com.au

Free, all welcome. Registration essential.

Agent Bodies can be seen at RMIT Gallery from 11am - 5pm Tuesday to Saturday. Visit rmitgallery.com for more information.

About the filmmakers

Mig Dann is a Melbourne-based artist undertaking a practice-led PhD in the School of Art at RMIT University. Her multidisciplinary and autobiographical art practice explores and expresses issues of childhood trauma. Her work is informed by memory and forgetting, absence and presence, feminism, queer culture and decades of lived experience.

Daniel R. Marks is an interdisciplinary artist based in Naarm/Melbourne, currently undertaking a PhD research project at RMIT University. Applying a framework of queer self-esotericism to processes of entropy and feedback-looping, Marks works through collusions of performance art, poetic-didactic writing/diagram work, sculptural installation, and accumulative media archives to exhume intertextual potentialities of embodiment. Artefacts of doing and undoing are, in Marks’ practice, choreographed as archaeo-architectural re-configurations of bodily agency.

Philip Brophy is one of Australia’s leading experts on cinema and sound. Since the late 1970s, he has produced creative content in diverse contexts as an artist, curator, author, film director, curator and musician. He has specific research interests in three distinct areas: horror, sex and exploitation; film sound and music; and, Japanese animation. He has spoken and published extensively across a diverse range of topics, including: film scores and sound design; manga and anime; imaging destruction; corporeality; and, representation.