MIŠKA MANDIĆ
’RESIDUE’
PREMIERING AT VERGE: 26 MAY – 6 JUNE, 2025
SCREENING ONLINE: 10 JUNE – 10 SEPTEMBER, 2025
Screening and artist Q&A: Thursday 29 May, 6pm
ARTIST STATEMENT
In Residue, the geological time held by all the minerals inside a mobile phone is visualised alongside the fruiting, sporing and decomposing time of fungi and soil. This is a troubled sense of stillness — the iPhone, like the lemon, like Angela, like the film crew, collide with people, animals, geological and tectonic movements, cameras, computers, ideologies, and visions of nationhood and time. Residue reconsiders what is regarded as important in the cinematic traditions of Western modernity and how in the gaps of its vision there are textures worth noticing.
Credits:
Starring Angela Goh
Directed, edited and composited by Miška Mandić
Cinematography by Petra Leslie
Timelapse cinematography by Miška Mandić
Sound design and music by Luke Bacon
Gaffer Remi Durrenberger
Phantom camera operator Andrew Collier
Camera assistant James Bartlett
Runner Eve Lande
Set hand Hugh Bennett
Residue is a Verge Digital project.
Miška Mandić, Residue, 2024, video still. Image courtesy of the artist.
EXHIBITION TEXT
Residue. A conversation
By Ju Bavyka
As I hear the title Residue for the first time, I experience a hint of pleasure and keep rolling the word around on my tongue. I like words that carry a materiality and unfold in both directions: the real smell of the world, like the greasy mark of fuel oil where a gear once turned and, simultaneously, the metaphorical ride. Residue reflects what is left—post-event, the evidence, the traces, the unusable, the imprint, the hangover—instead of the legacy, the effect, the impact... the memory.
The video begins in soft focus: perhaps the viewpoint of someone lying down, eyes blurry. The sounds of a suburban morning. Birdsong, green stillness, idyllic and peaceful—how did I end up here? And in that moment—if you’re like me, trained since my childhood in the early nineties to anticipate crisis—there’s an uneasy feeling creeping in. Nothing foretold trouble. This is the kind of beauty that warns.
Then, we are indoors. A woman (Angela) enters a sunlit apartment with a large bag of lemons and a bunch of tulips. An act of self-care or preparation for a cocktail party? Her phone flashes and a micro-expression clouds her face: aversion, concern, or just fatigue? She tends to the flowers, her movements slowed, quiet; the screen almost becomes a still life. We have enough time to wander, to notice the floral painting on the wall, the hand-shaped sculpture on the table. Un-folding begins. There is a simultaneous sense of stillness and movement. The flowers move too quickly, compared to the woman, reminiscent of macro footage in a nature documentary. Time starts to stretch in different directions. It takes a while for the focus to shift to the lemons. Something happens—the lemons age, collapse, rot. Fruit flies arrive. Mould swells. Sirens wail softly outside.
Change is one of the most difficult phenomena for the human mind to process. We admire historical ruins and fear aging. We live in a culture of not wanting to get old. We talk about progress and measure success by it, yet we struggle with unpredictability and sudden deviation. We rarely see the moment of decay so close to the moment of flourishing. Imagine a world where everything happens at the same time—blooming and fading, growing and aging—as if someone made a hole or portal in linear time and removed whatever holds the beginning and the end apart. Portals and folds, Miška recently explained, are cinematic metaphors that she has used in both Residue and her preceding work, The Fold (2021).[1]
In cinematic language, time often stops when something happens—a break, a pause, half-eaten food; when everything is abandoned to itself. What we experience in this work is asynchrony: the curtain sways slowly, the flies devour the lemons quickly. The transformation is slow, yet unnervingly complete. We watch change unfold as both ruin and ritual—a time-lapse of decay, intimacy and domestic life unravelling in slow motion. We live in a culture that demands beauty, speed, clarity. Residue stages time as asymmetric—the curtain flutters while the flies frenzy. The lemons sweat inside their bag like grief bottled. There is no resolution. A bag of lemons, damp with condensation on the inside. A sense of abandonment: trapped in plastic with nowhere to go.
Decay makes one feel exposed. We live in a world of freshness. Food scraps are thrown out as soon as they smell off—schnell weg damit, get rid of it quickly, before the flies come. They remind me of the flies that haunt my pot plants in winter, called Trauermücke in German—sad flies. I slowly start to feel grateful for the experience of watching this video. I think a lot about my own constantly changing body, in its tender, early forties age. I start to think about decomposition as an interruption to business as usual.
Slowly, the lemons transform into something completely different, fascinating mouldy stones with uneven surfaces. They, alongside the withering tulips, present the kind of passivity we can also enjoy. Only the flies keep flying, like sacred insects, moving freely between portals of time. They keep us grounded in this video’s earthbound, non-portal time. The hand-shaped sculpture on the table next to the tulips becomes a metaphor for herstory. Like any sculpture, it’s a story frozen in time, as if everything paused at the snap of a finger. I am reminded of something I recently read about films and storytelling by one of my favourite divination writers. Films aren’t supposed to make you think, or participate. Stories are what we turn to when we want to switch off at the end of a hard day. ‘Participate in storytelling? How awkward! How weird…how queer. Ugh. No one wants to do that. No one wants to own our participation in the collective storytelling that we are doing together as we live these entwined lives.’[2]
The camera returns to the woman, Angela, and we witness her watching a TV screen showing a buried iPhone sprouting fungi. Is she dreaming? Is she seeing? The symbiosis of the phone and the fungi—it’s unclear who is feeding whom. A fleshy portal is visible on the iPhone screen. Decay and fruiting.
The final scene is impulsive. The human body follows the urge to answer the phone. The phone is destroyed. The gesture is ambiguous, necessary. Angela screams into the camera in a voiceless act. The promise of beauty, ending in shards. The work challenges expectations. We expect abundance, smoothness, intactness, things going according to plan. This is harder and harder to maintain.
Fascination with decay is its own genre. Photographers have built careers on ruins—think of post-socialist monuments. For some, it’s a nice, thick coffee table book. I always had unresolved feelings when looking at those images myself. It’s a kind of fascination that drags me through nostalgia and pain. When Angela screams and you can’t hear it, it’s monumental. In slow motion, she becomes multiple fragmented Italian sculptures.
Time is often approached from the perspective of melancholy, glorious memory. Our minds are built to remember good and forget the bad. Remembering bad things is framed as trauma, as error—something to be fixed. But we don’t have enough rituals to process this. I think here of trauma leakages as toxic spills—another of Miška’s terms. And I think about the lemons, sweating in plastic, in plastic’s greenhouse effect, as a metaphor for this. We speak psychologically about bottling things up, putting a lid on it, pretending there is nothing there. But here, the flies play a role. They’re the transmitters, the indicators, the evidence of an unfolding.
It is not nostalgia that we are haunted by in our own herstories, and not melancholy. Miška’s work doesn’t traffic in nostalgia or melancholy either. She takes perception of time into futuristic absurdity, refuses a comfortable timeline, and actively looks for other imaginary paths by lifting and holding time-interruption above the void of historical resentments. She is looking for futurity with material responsibility—as an attempt to notice processes of change, like the climate crisis and the erosion of Earth’s resources that formed and stretch over such a significant amount of time and that while being unavoidably present, remain unseen?
Notes
[1] Miška Mandić, ‘Folding Cinema: How does a cinematic temporality that is relational and intimate work against dominant, established modes of temporal reproduction?’, PhD thesis, UNSW Arts Design and Architecture, 2024, https://doi.org/10.26190/unsworks/30110
[2] Alice Sparkly Kat, ‘Find the Right Questions’, 16 May 2025, https://www.alicesparklykat.com/articles/634/Find_the_Right_Questions/