In April 2018 PUBLICS presents a new multi-screen work Mermaids, Mirror Worlds by the Karrabing Film Collective—a group of indigenous artists from Australia’s Top End—inspired by their research visit to the Valkerij en Sigarenmakerij (Falconry and Cigar-makers) Museum in Valkenswaard. This will be the collective’s first new work following their screening survey at the TATE Modern in London, and their presentation at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. This new work is commissioned together with Frontier Imaginaries (Amsterdam), the Institute of Modern Art (Brisbane), and Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven), and with funding support from the Australian Government’s Indigenous Languages and Arts Program. In addition to the newly commissioned work situated in Merikerho–a  ship, which transported cargo from Åland to the Finnish mainland until 2015 and prior to that was sailing in Dutch coast and canals–PUBLICS hosts a screening consisting three short films by the collective, and a talk by anthropologist, activist and gender studies professor Elizabeth A. Povinelli, four other members of Karrabing Film Collective (Gavin Bienamu, Aiden Sing, Rex Sing, Shannan Sing), and curators Annie Fletcher and Vivian Ziherl.

Mermaids, Mirror Worlds flips between a fictional account of a toxic ravaged world and nonfictional promotional material from industrial giants such as Monsanto and the Dow Chemical Corporation. In the near presentfictional world Europeans can no longer survive for long periods outdoors in a land and seascape poisoned by capitalism, but Indigenous people seem able to. A young Indigenous man, Aiden, taken away when he was just a baby to be a part of a medical experiment to save the white race, is released into the world of his family. In the nonfictional world wild claims are made about the healthy, safe and protective practices of multinational capitalization of nature. As views travel with Aiden,  his father and brother across these landscape they confront two possible futures and pasts.

Begun in 2008, in the shadow the Australian state’s assault on Indigenous social worlds and lands, The Karrabing Film Collective is a grassroots Indigenous based arts and film group who use their aesthetic practices as a means of self-organization and social analysis. Their films and art works represent their lives, create bonds with their land, and intervene in global images of Indigeneity. They develop local artistic languages and forms, while allowing audiences to understand new forms of collective Indigenous agency. Most Karrabing live on a rural Indigenous community in the Northern Territory.

ANNIE FLETCHER is chief curator at the Van Abbemuseum. Recent and current projects include the solo of Qiu Zhijie, the ten day caucus project in collaboration with DAI called Becoming More in 2017, a collaborative research project led by Vivian Ziherl called Frontier Imaginaries Trade Markings in 2018 and a large scale and travelling museum retrospective of the Otolith Group in 2019. As a curator Fletcher is interested how this practice now firmly established in institutions of contemporary art (through artworks, buildings, programmes, spaces and bodies) achieve resonance in public space today. She will look at curatorial modes and practices which actively address how the art institution has been released from the production of progressive or modernist time and fixed ideas of autonomous praxis and rather address more heterogeneous, constitutive and complex ideas of time and space today. She is interested in how and whether the mode of the exhibition, or a cultural programme/narrative, or put more simply the encounter with art, can generate relevant shared civic space today.

ELIZABETH A. POVINELLI is Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and The Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality at Columbia University and one of the founding members of the Karrabing Film Collective. Her work has explored the governance of late liberalism as it manifests in settler colonial contexts across five books, most recently, Geontologies, A Requiem for Late Liberalism, which was the 2017 recipient of the Lionel Trilling Book Award; and six films and several installations with the Karrabing Collective. Karrabing films were awarded the 2015 Visible Award and the 2015 Cinema Nova Award Best Short Fiction Film, Melbourne International Film Festival and have shown internationally including in the Berlinale Forum Expanded, Sydney Biennale; MIFF, the Tate Modern, documenta-14, and the Contour Biennale.

VIVIAN ZIHERL is a critic, curator and researcher. In 2015 Ziherl founded the art and research project Frontier Imaginaries as an Institute of Modern Art Brisbane Curatorial Fellow (2014/5). Frontier Imaginaries will hold its fifth edition ‘Trade Markings’ in 2018 with the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, following its fourth edition ‘Humans of the Institution’ co-curated with Anne Szefer Karlsen and the University of Bergen in 2017, and its third edition ‘Toxic Assets’ with e-flux and Columbia University also in 2017. In 2016 Vivian was curator of Jerusalem Show VIII Before and After Origins, with Al Ma’mal Foundation and as part of the 3rd Qalandiya International. From 2013 to 2015, she led the roving curatorial project Landings, co-founded with Natasha Ginwala and Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art (Rotterdam). From 2012-2014 Vivian worked with Dutch feminist and performance organization If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want to be Part of Your Revolution, and from 2011-2012 with Kunstverein Amsterdam. She is editor of the Lip Anthology (MacMillan, Kunstverein Publishing) and doctoral candidate in Curatorial Practice with the department of Art, Design and Architecture at Monash University, Melbourne.

PROGRAM:

10.–15.4.2018

 Daily 12–3PM

PUBLICS (Sturenkatu 37-41 4b, 00550 Helsinki)

Screening of Night Time Go (2017), The Jealous One (2017) and Wutharr, Saltwater Dreams (2016) by the Karrabing Film Collective

 Tuesday 10 April 5-7PM

PUBLICS Talk: The Karrabing Film Collective (Gavin Bienamu, Aiden Sing, Rex Sing, Shannan Sing) with writer Elizabeth A. Povinelli and curators Annie Fletcher & Vivian Ziherl

 Daily 2-5PM

 Opening Tuesday 10 April, 7.30–10PM

MERIKERHO (Sörnäisten Rantapromenadi, 00530 Helsinki)

The Karrabing Film Collective: Mermaids, Mirror Worlds (2018)