Perth Voice Interactive

A  GHOST tent and things that go bump in the night (or day), Dead Ringer is a deliciously dark exhibition transforming PICA’s heritage-listed James Street home into an art-house version of the Royal Show’s haunted house.

“[It’s] a very dark summer show, but sometimes you need an antidote to the beach and endless sunshine,” curator Leigh Robb says.

The massive exhibition brings together a raft of artists and photographers from around the world and Australia, including Steve McQueen — not the dead one, but leading UK artist and award-winning film director of the same name, best known for his films, Hunger, Shame and 12 Years a Slave.

There’ll be images of a cast of a Maori chief head (it resides in Paris), and Lisa Reihana’s video installation Tai Whetuki (house of death) lures the viewer into a thick tropical forest of a Tahitian chief mourner.

Keg de Souza interviews “ghost catchers” in Indonesia using mirrors in a reflective installation where figures and voices ricochet around the room.

Luminous indigenous artwork on the gallery walls is triggered by strobe lighting going off randomly.

“It’s so bright it lights the whole gallery — and literally scares visitors,” Robb says gleefully.

Running alongside the exhibition are a couple of gallery talks. In Spooks and Spectres: Tales from Parallel Worlds writer, performer and story-teller Finn O’Branagain draws on the exhibition’s unsettling tales of ghosts, doppelgangers, changelings and missing twins.

“[An] art tour for people who have heard things go bump in the night, who listen for echoes in the dark, who look behind paintings on hotel walls for secret messages left behind,” the blurb says.

Ghost Focus: Double Exposures and Apparitions in 19th Century Photography looks at the photos capturing ghosts, starting with William Mumler who in the 1860s kicked off a world-wide craze for “spirit photography”.

UWA professor Emily Eastgate Brink explores the “ghost photo” as a double portrait and convenient fiction, while also questioning its role as a document of the living and the dead.

“Does she debunk the idea of ghost photos?” the Voice asks: “You’ll have to come along to find out,” Robb says enigmatically.

Ghost Focus is on Tuesday December 8, 6pm, tix $15, Spooks and Spectres is a free talk Friday December 11, 6 and 8pm, but you need to book.

Dead Ringer is on until December 27.

by JENNY D’ANGER