Runway Journal Issue 44: Time
Chi Tran
If heaven is temporary, 2021, short film, 9mins.
Courtesy of the artist and Runway Journal.
Photo by Jeremy Weihrauch
Runway Journal is a digital publication that has been commissioning experimental works by emerging artists for almost two decades. The sole focus of the artist-run organisation is to guide contributors through a close editorial and digital mentorship in the development of new work. Runway Journal is an online resource that engages with current threads of Australian and international contemporary art.
Runway Journal's Issue 44: Time features contributions spanning painting, poetry, video, essay and sound that offer new ways to consider holding 'time'.
MAMA is pleased to present If heaven is temporary by Chi Tran in partnership with Runway Journal as part of a new program that offers support to Australian artists creating new experimental moving image works.
As a writer who is heavily influenced by film, If heaven is temporary marks Chi Tran's departure from writing and into visual storytelling. This work is the first instalment of a larger, ongoing research project that considers the life and afterlife of language.
To experience the full suite of works commissioned as part of Issue 44: TIME, click the link below.
Artist Biography
Chi Tran is a writer and artist interested in language as a form of devotion, working mainly through essay, auto-theory, and writing exhibition texts for other artists. They often write about the grief for what expression cannot achieve, thinking about the inevitable loss between an event or experience, and the act of writing it into expression. Chi’s practice is invested in the affective functions of language and phenomenological possibilities of combined critical and poetic writing.
