Outdoor Screen Program: (Un)earth
Header Image: Rare Earth, Robert McDougall, (2021)
Behind the excavation processes required for the energy demands of advanced capitalism, we find the violent social and ecological vicissitudes of landscapes rendered toxic, lifeless and uncanny. Untangling the intersections of settler colonialism, technological progress, neoliberal capitalism and environmental degradation, this program unearths the true cost of extraction industries, meditating on the philosophy and lifeways of Indigenous knowledge systems.
Libby Harward’s Salt Water Reflections (2020) is part of a series of works called DABILBUNG (broken water) which consist of sound, video works, installation and performance, amplifying the issues facing fresh and saltwater country and culture. She began her journey in the “wild”-flower season of 2019 with her two children, through what is known in contemporary western terms as “The Murray-Darling Basin” (The Baaka and The Bidgee), on this project that longs to restore traditional custodianship back to our fresh-water-ways: the rivers, creeks, lagoons, channels and wetlands that are currently threatened with imminent extinction. Following the footsteps of her Ancestors, she we began this journey on her Ancestral country, beautiful Mulgumpin, in the Quandamooka, spending time with her Ngugi Elder, Gheebelum, Uncle Bob Anderson, listening with her children and reflecting-in fresh-water stories.
Pia Borg’s Silica (2017) explores territorial constructs and the boundaries of the real and the mediated in an opal mining town in the South Australian desert. Charting the journey of a film location scout, notions of settlement and belonging, identity and mythology are investigated through images of a town in the midst of abandonment.
Rare Earth (2021) by Robert McDougall is an essay film about rare earth mining in the remote Inner Mongolia region of China. Filmed on location, Rare Earth explores the metaphysics of rampant human growth, examining how premodern knowledge practices compare to the ethos and ontology of modernity and of unmitigated technological expansion.
Already Occupied – Yuwayi! Jana-n-ba Wunjayi! (Goodbye! Go away now!) (2018) is part of Libby Harward’s ongoing project Already Occupied, that asserts Aboriginal Sovereignty often through site specific actions on country and their documentation. Via drone footage, this iteration of Already Occupied presents documentation of temporary performative installations undertaken by Harward on the beaches of Minjerribah (North Stradbroke Island) and Mulgumpin (Moreton Island), which are part of Quandamooka Country.
- Curated by Anita Spooner
Artist Biographies
Libby Harward is a descendant of the Ngugi people of Mulgumpin (Moreton Island) in the Quandamooka. Harward creates artworks that break through the colonial overlay to connect with the cultural landscape, which always was, and remains to be there. Her political practice, in a range of genres, continues this decolonising process.
Robert McDougall is a non-Aboriginal Australian artist, composer, filmmaker and anthropologist whose work incorporates video art, essay film, photographic print, kinetic installation and electroacoustic music. Focusing on archival, ethnographic and metaphysical research, his work explores durational and formalist aesthetics, vernacular traditions and the Avant Garde, knowledge practices and unconsidered histories, post-conflict trauma and justice, numinous spaces and the sublime. Recent work includes films on post-conflict trauma in the Caucasus region and an ongoing doctoral research project on monasticism in the West Himalayas and the perspectival worlds of South Asian traditional knowledge.
Pia Borg is a Maltese/ Australian artist and filmmaker who lives and works in London and Los Angeles. She is the recipient of numerous prizes including the Golden Leopard for best international short. Her films have been in the official selection of the Cannes Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, Rotterdam International Film Festival, SXSW and Experimenta among others. Borg has been featured in solo exhibitions at Oriel Davies Gallery (Wales) and Szara Gallery (Poland). Other recent exhibitions and screenings include ICA, London; Wellcome Collection; Museum of Moving Image, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Museum of Modern Art, Poland; Arnolfini, Bristol; FormContent, London; and Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. In 2014 she joined the Experimental Animation faculty at CalArts.
Anita Spooner is an independent producer, curator and editor based in Naarm/ Melbourne.
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