CINE@ART DOC WF “Tempest” – Bridget Sutherland, New Zealand, 2024, 9’

Synopsis: How many artists question technology, especially military technology?

‘Tempest’ is named for the nuclear industrial storm imagined inside the concrete silo where the NZ artist Peter Roche staged his final installation ‘Asylum’, a daring collection of works that speak to the nuclear uncanny and the dangers underscoring our new radioactive world.

This invasion of the military into our lives provides the context for much of Peter’s work, spanning his performances from the 1970’s through to his later light and kinetic sculptures.

In ‘Transformation’ of 1979, Peter had raw organs stitched onto the surface of his skin in a cutting-edge performance that suggested the vulnerability of living matter in an era of nuclear fission where radioactive materials form a stamp not only on the planet but the body itself.

Peter’s later exhibition ‘Trophies and Emblems’, 1990, explores this physical but often unconscious embodiment of the nuclear in the form of large kinetic sculptures designed to confront the viewer in an exploration of territories and the psychological spaces of the military industrial complex.

However, it was not until ‘Asylum’, 2016, Peter’s final public installation in an abandoned concrete silo, that he confronted the nuclear threat head on. Commanding works with titles such as Meltdown, Flotilla and Tempest underscore the dangers of nuclear military technology and the vulnerability of a culture so entangled in its manufacture and the global reach of its destructive toxic legacy.

‘Tempest’ is dedicated to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.

• Director: Bridget Sutherland
• Writer: Bridget Sutherland
• Producer: Bridget Sutherland, Stuart Page
• Key Cast: Peter Roche, Paul Judge, Gregory Burke