Sydney-based artist Tessa Rex presents SEQUESTERED, a live experimental documentary unfolding over COP24, the UN’s ongoing climate change conference. Inspired by a residency in sub-arctic Canada – with advice from ecologist Dr James Hitchcock – she creates three representations of ‘solutions’ to global warming.
 
These absurd real-life scenarios could have been sci-fi films: fertilising the Indian Ocean with iron filings; cooling coral on the Great Barrier Reef with fans; spraying sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere. In SEQUESTERED, Rex shows these three scenarios in micro-scale as representative experiments.

Adjacent to these experiments is a projection from sub-arctic Dawson City, Canada. In January 2018 the local government tried to construct an ‘ice bridge’ with a water cannon to connect West Dawson and Dawson City. Usually in winter with temperatures plunging to -40C the Yukon River freezes enough for cars to drive between the territories. For the last two years the once reliable thoroughfare has only partially frozen.

SEQUESTERED will be shown concurrently with an online exhibition EVERYTHING’S SHIT IT’S REALLY BAD, at Sister Gallery. www.sistergallery.com.au

Tessa Rex is an emerging documentary artist and former climate change activist working with digital and analogue film and installation. In 2018 she was a resident fellow of The Weight of Mountains in sub-arctic Dawson City, Canada. In 2016 Rex had her second solo installation, No Matter at GAFFA Gallery in Sydney and two-person collaborative installation Vapid Cut with Patch Sinclair. She has made short documentaries about the Arab spring in Bahrain, the Night Bus in Brooklyn and The Williamsburg Houses. In 2015 Rex was a collaborative fellow at Union Docs Center for Documentary Art in Brooklyn, New York. She has exhibited in Sydney, Istanbul,Berlin, Mexico City, Taiwan, Dawson and New York.
 
Rex is the Head of Video, Digital, at Bauer Media Australia, as well as a board member of RUNWAY Australian Experimental Art Journal and a member of new Sydney-based celluloid collective The Highlighter Brigade.