2018
Video, sound
27 minutes
Courtesy of the artists
“The Karrabing Film Collective uses film to analyze contemporary settler colonialism and through these depictions challenge its grip. In the shadow of Third Cinema and Theater of the Oppressed, Karrabing is creating a new model for Indigenous filmmaking and activism.”
–Karrabing Film Collective
Following the story of Aiden, an indigenous boy taken from his parents by scientists conducting a eugenics experiment, The Mermaids or Aiden in Wonderland (2018), draws upon haunting parallels between legacies of colonial violence experienced by the Belyuen community in Australia’s Northern Territories both in the past and the present moment. Created by the Karrabing Film Collective and set in a not so distant dystopian future, the film’s scenes of conflict, confusion, and mysticism create a visually rich and disturbing narrative of transformation and loss in the wake of colonialism and its effects on Aiden, his community, and the land. The non-linear structuring of The Mermaids elicits memory itself, and brings to the forefront violence which has been enacted but often hidden in predominant accounts of history. With roughly 30 members, the Karrabing Film Collective was created in 2008 as a type of grassroots activism focused on creating both films and installation work. Through an approach named by the collective as “improvisational realism,” the group initiates a kind of resistance to traditional narratives and forms of history and documentary practice, often using hand-held devices and bringing enduring legacies of exploitation and its lasting effects to the forefront of the viewer’s experience.
The Mermaids or Aiden in Wonderland was screened in the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery from September 20-October 2, 2020.
Further reading:
Martha Schwendener, “Karrabing Film Collective Reflects a Disturbing Reality at MoMA PS1,” New York Times, May 15, 2019
Ben Eastham, “Karrabing Film Collective,” ArtReview, January 1, 2020
Elizabeth A. Povinelli, “Geontologies: The Figures and the Tactics,” eflux Journal #78, December 2016
Elizabeth A. Povinelli, “Geontologies: The Concept and Its Territories,” eflux Journal #81, April 2017