As part of Revelation Perth International Film Festival, PICA presents video artist Shaun Gladwell’s meditative investigations of movement under Melbourne’s restrictive COVID-19 lockdown.

For these two recent video works Key Strikes (2022) and Homo Suburbiensis (2020), installed together for the first time, Gladwell operated within the curfewed 5km radius. His signature ‘movement languages’ – skating, BMX riding and climbing and bouldering – play out in an environment of essential only travel and social distancing.

Using traditional filmic devices, shorter durations, multiple edits, voiceover and subtitles, the artist investigates the strategic and creative misuse of civic space. Key Strikes and Homo Suburbiensis act as poetic bookends to Melbourne’s lockdown laws as Gladwell freely (re)claims newly emptied urban spaces.