A wondrous and immersive house of fun has been built at the NGV International, where furniture hangs from the ceiling, pink flamingos talk and cheeky garden gnomes chat back in Open House: Tromarama for Kids (until 18 October), at the dedicated children’s galleries at NGV International.
The house features five fully-furnished rooms – a kitchen, dining room, courtyard, bedroom and bathroom – and will be centred around nine imaginative video works, which show ordinary household objects coming to life in extraordinary and playful ways. Created by Indonesian contemporary art collective Tromarama (Febie Babyrose, Herbert Hans and Ruddy Hatumena), this rich and experiential exhibition is a follow up to the hugely successful Express Yourself! Romance Was Born for Kids, which attracted 85,000 children to NGV International.
Using everyday objects such as lamps, shoes, buttons and crockery, Tromarama create stop-motion animation videos with a ‘kidult’ approach. These films are created in the spirit of play and imagination, yet explore in-depth themes such as identity, materialism, consumer culture and the natural versus the artificial. Each video is the result of hundreds of hours of work painstakingly moving thousands of objects as part of complex stop -motion animation process, where it can take up to 3 months to create a four minute film.
In addition to the humorous and thought-provoking video works, the interiors of each room will include participatory multimedia elements for young visitors to experience. In the courtyard section of the installation, familiar garden ornaments and infrastructure including a gnome, drain pipes and a tree stump will ‘chat back’ after recording the visitor’s own voice. A large-scale feature wall of colourful flowers in the courtyard will frame the compelling video work, Nothing Is What It Seems, which captures time passing where fresh flowers bloom and die to reveal the video’s title phrase in artificial blooms, commenting on the blurry lines of artificiality and reality in contemporary culture.
Tony Ellwood, Director, NGV, said, ‘In Open House: Tromarama for Kids play and art come together, encouraging children to express their creativity and ignite their imaginations. This exhibition builds on the success of our recent children’s exhibition Express Yourself! Romance Was Born for Kids, which attracted 85,000 children to NGV International and as the 10 day Children’s festival, which attracted more than 14,000 children across both NGV International and NGV Australia earlier this year.’
Children can dance in the upside-down Dining Room, where tables and chairs will be suspended from the roof and dancing on the ‘ceiling’ is encouraged. Soundtracks in Tromarama’s video works Everyone is Everybody, 2012, and Wattt?!, 2010, complement the dance floor experience. The film Wattt?! shows a mischievous desk lamp throwing an all-night party with his other object friends – the artists’ ‘kidult’ response to the time they received an exorbitant electricity bill.
In the kitchen, the film Ting*, 2008, shows a group of audacious cups, mugs and plates abandoning their dull lives in the kitchen cupboard, in search of adventure. The crockery forms a choreographed chorus line, which is accompanied by a soundtrack of tinkling porcelain. Three white mugs represent the artists themselves, and the video conveys the artists’ feelings of missing out on their ‘playtime’ and lamenting their time in the office.
In the bathroom, Pilgrimage, 2011 features a large cast of unlikely animated objects, from a scrubbing brush to a hot pink flamingo, rotating in endless circles in an attempt to explain some of life’s big questions.
To further enhance the experience for children, Tromarama has collaborated with the NGV to develop Tromaramix – a new stop motion app which can be used inside the exhibition and at home. Children can use a variety of toys in stop-motion booths positioned inside the exhibition to create their own animation, which can then be shared with friends and family.
Coinciding with the exhibition, the NGV Design Store has collaborated with Tromarama to publish a flipbook featuring imagery from Tromarama’s 2011 work Pilgrimage, from the NGV collection. Created especially for children, the palm-sized book captures the magic of stop-motion animation, revealing moving images actually comprised of a series of static pictures, which when played at speed create the illusory effect of motion. Tromarama’s paper version of two extracts from their film will delight children and adults alike as they watch a birthday cake’s candles flicker and melt, or flipped the opposite way, an inflatable shark toy swimming in circles on a Persian carpet.
Open House: Tromarama for Kids is at NGV International until 18 October 2015. Free entry.
