German artist Julian Rosefeldt’s ‘Manifesto’ sees Cate Blanchett inhabit 13 unique personas.

Oscar-winning Australian actress Cate Blanchett is no stranger to getting into character, but now The Lord of the Rings star and fromer artistic director of the Sydney Theatre Company has turned her chameleon-esque acting skills to realising a new multi-video art work in a collaboration with German artist Julian Rosefeldt. Manifesto, which is at the heart of Rosefeldt’s survey exhibition opening at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne in December, examines the interplay between belief and reality, posing the question: have the dynamics between politics, art and life shifted?

Drawing on the core philosophies of a range of 20th and 21st century artistic movements, including writings by Futurist, Dadaist, Fluxus artists, Suprematists among others, Rosefeldt has distilled these newly composed ‘manifestos’ into a series of 13 monologues, each performed by Blanchett. However, by inhabiting a range of different personas – among them a school teacher, a puppeteer, a newsreader, a factory worker and a homeless man – Blanchett injects a disrupting current of social context, imbuing these famous artistic texts with new meaning.

Each of Blanchett’s 13 performances are simultaneously projected as a video installation, further adding to the complexities of the intermingled cacophony of philosophies. Rosefeldt hopes to amplify the “poetry” of the various literary sources he has drawn upon, and in doing so create an homage to the beauty and eloquence of artistic reasoning. “The art scene at the beginning of the last century was still very small. To be heard, artists needed to scream extremely loudly,” Rosefeldt explains. “The art scene today is a global network and business with diverse means of expression, and manifesto as a medium of artistic articulation has become less relevant in a globalised and connected art world.”

Manifesto opens at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image on December 6.

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