New Video

Zanny Begg is a Sydney based cross-disciplinary artist, writer and organiser. Her work uses humour, understated drawings and found cultural artifacts to explore ways in which we can live and be in the world differently. Zanny often works collaboratively and her work seeks a dialogue with the communities within which it is based, the people who inform it and/or its viewers. Her work probes the social and spatial architecture of life in urban environments and questions what it means to be political today. For a list of recent projects and exhibitions click here.

Begg’s expanded conception of artistic practice integrates the socially engaged function of self-organised activity, the strategic constitution of new publics, with the socially concerned content of her more properly artistic works, which offer a symbolic imagining of the political sophistication—potential and actual—of these new publics. Through this dual politicisation, Begg and her complex network of Australian and international collaborators, a continuation of the activist networks developed by the 1990s social movements who first realised the communicative power of the internet, participate in a significant revitalisation of the social function of aesthetic production that works with and against existing institutional structures to stake a claim for symbolic and political autonomy- Reuben Keehan, Of Beatial Acts and Rabbits in Hats, Broadsheet, Volume 38.3, Sep/Nov 2009.

The Bull Laid Bear, 23mins video and animation, 2012, by Zanny Begg and Oliver Ressler.

The Bull Laid Bear “lays bare” the economic recession (bear market) that hides behind each boom time (bull market). The film is structured around a series of interviews with US economists and activists including: William K. Black, a white-collar criminologist; Yves Smith, the author of the blog Naked Capitalism; Tiffiniy Cheng campaign coordinator for A New Way Forward; and Gerald Epstein co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute. The material gathered from these four interviewees has been blended with hand drawn animations to create a quasi-fictitious criminal world of gangster bankers and corrupt courts.

Sydney based performer Singing Sadie provides a sound track for the film with a reinterpretation of Billie Holiday’s classic lament on money, God Bless The Child.

Next screening at Eva International Limerick, Ireland.

The Irish Haircut, drawing for Eva International, Bienniel of Visual Art.

Emeraldtown, Gary Indiana will be exhibited as part of Social Networking at Queensland Gallery of Modern Art Media Gallery March 3 - June 24, 2012. To see a discussion with exhibition curator Peter McKay see here.

The Bull Laid Bear, screening at Artspace as part of the Occupy Art International Day of Action. Guest Speaker Steve Keen

Sunday February 12 2pm
Artspace Seminar Room
43-51 Cowper Wharf Road,
Woolloomooloo, Sydney.