Karrabing Film Collective: Wonderland

“Our films are neither fiction nor nonfiction. They come from and return to our ancestral lands. They emerge from and sink back into the lives we are actually living with our “durlg (dreamings).” —Karrabing

Haus der Kunst München is delighted to present the first major European museum survey of the Karrabing Film Collective. Comprising up to fifty members from different generations, most of whom live in the Belyuen Community in Australia’s Northern Territory, Karrabing deploys filmmaking and installation as a form of Indigenous self-organisation and grassroots resistance. Often described as “improvisational realism”, the films seek to open up a space beyond binaries of the fictional and the documentary, or the past and the present. As they note in the Emmiyengal language, “karrabing” refers to the point at which the saltwater tides of Australia’s north-western coast have reached their lowest point and are set to return to shore. The word infers a form of fluid collective practice constantly flowing outwards and receding back, operating in tandem with, but also ancillary to, top-down government-imposed structures of land ownership.

Responding to the inherently mutable nature of the word karrabing, the exhibition Karrabing Film Collective. Wonderland will similarly be characterised by shifting topographies and fluctuating temporalities; opening it outwards into several formats and including film, audio, graphics, workshops, as well as the first comprehensive reader published on their practice. Furthermore, in addition to presenting all of Karrabing’s works to date, Haus der Kunst München has also co-produced Karrabing’s newest film Macassans vs. Berragut: Let the Ancestors Decide (2023), which will premiere in the spring.

These individual components of the exhibition—videos, sounds, voices, images and texts—offer the opportunity of an exercise in learning and create entry-points that are designed to challenge universal notions of hegemonic understandings of power and knowledge production. These entry-points not only concern the dynamics between First Nations and colonial-settler Australians, but also speak to universal concerns affecting the relationship between human and non-human life forms, as well as the maintenance and care of the land and of the earth’s varied eco-systems.

A further entry-point into Karrabing’s practice concerns the group’s investigations into—and use of—language and voice within their practice. Karrabing members communicate to one another in a form of creole unique to the region, often supplementing this with various soundbites and media clips whose linguistic registers encompass everything from Received Pronunciation to Australian colloquialisms. This specific interest in the use and manipulation of sound and language will also be mirrored is two audio-sensory timelines that are placed in the very centre of the exhibition. Conceived together with Karrabing, these predominantly audio spaces seek to display a “mapping” of the cooperative’s practice; featuring texts, songs and field recordings which recall the predominantly oral-manner in which ancestral knowledge is conveyed.

Underpinning the rationale of the whole exhibition then is the question of what can be learnt about the elasticity and porosity of today’s society from the Karrabing’s unique filmic and methodological language. In this way, the show follows Tony Cokes’ recent exhibition Fragments, or just Moments in the LSK-Galerie in continuing Haus der Kunst’s focus on the rooms of the former air raid shelter, being a space where history is challenged and reconsidered by using moving-image and sound to form new narratives. Enacting a deliberate friction with the history of the building, the exhibition thus critically interrogates the concepts of representation, belonging and cultural memory, introducing audiences to a collaborative, imbricated model of togetherness based upon dynamic interactions and creative exchanges.

Curated by Damian Lentini, with Anne Pfautsch.

On the occasion of the exhibition, Haus der Kunst München will also be producing a comprehensive Karrabing Film Collection. Wonderland—A Reader, published by Distanz Verlag.