EXHIBITION

Day in the Life is the first presentation of Karrabing Film Collective’s work in Central Australia. At the center of the show is a sneak preview of a four channel installation—morning/play break/cocktail hour/dinner time—exploring the ordinary obstacles Indigenous families face as they move through an ordinary day. Layered with lyrics written by the collective and music directed by its younger members, morning/play break/cocktail hour/dinner time dramatises and satirises settler forms of governance and extractive capitalism. The installation includes form video screens and ground soundscape.

ARTIST BIOS

KARRABING FILM COLLECTIVE

The Karrabing Film Collective includes approximately 30 members—predominantly living in the Belyuen community—who together create films using an “improvisational realism” that opens a space beyond binaries of the fictional and the documentary, the past and the present. Meaning “low tide” in the Emmiyengal language, karrabing refers to a form of collectivity outside of government-imposed strictures of clanship or land ownership. Shot on handheld cameras and phones, most of Karrabing’s films dramatize and satirize the daily scenarios and obstacles that collective members face in their various interactions with corporate and state entities. Composing webs of nonlinear narratives that touch on cultural memory, place, and ancestry by freely jumping in time and place, Karrabing exposes and intervenes into the longstanding facets of colonial violence that impact members directly, such as environmental devastation, land restrictions, and economic exploitation. The Karrabing Film Collective has presented its work at IMA Brisbane; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Institut fur Auslandsbeziehungen, Berlin; Jakarta Biennale; Centre Pompidou, Paris; e-flux, New York; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; Tate Modern, London; Documenta 14, Kassel; the Melbourne International Film Festival; Berlinale, Forum Expanded; and Biennale of Sydney; MoMAPS1.

LISA STEFANOFF

Lisa Stefanoff is an ARC Research Fellow with the National Institute for Experimental Arts (NIEA), UNSW Art & Design, based in Mparntwe where she is working on experimental collaborative practice-led immersive media projects with desert women artists. Lisa has lived in the NT since 2002, working as an anthropologist, a film & radio maker, a book editor, a public programmer, a curator, a mother and a creative producer with an array of Indigenous and other community art and media organisations. Over the past 5 years she has created events around Karrabing Film Collective’s work within a broader curatorial focus on eco-crisis, cultural survival, acoustemology and emerging art-media forms of resistance to settler colonial dominations of country and people.