Karrabing Film Collective: Wonderland, LSK-Galerie at Haus der Kunst, Munich; Karrabing Film Colllective: They pretending not to see us . . ., Graphic Cabinet, Secession, Vienna

“Karrabing means low tide turning,” explains the Indigenous woman in the video Art for the Ancestors (2021) that welcomes visitors upon entering the Haus der Kunst in Munich, setting the frame for the exhibition Karrabing Film Collective: Wonderland. Then she names five different Indigenous communities based in Australia’s Northern Territory, forming the Karrabing Film Collective, which currently consists of roughly thirty people ranging from newborn to sixty-five years. In 1984, Elizabeth A. Povinelli arrived on First Nations territory and was invited to collaborate as an anthropologist. Over the last four decades, she has built a relationship with the inhabitants, and she is a founding member of the Karrabing Film Collective which formed in 2007.
Damian Lentini and Anne Pfautsch curated their first solo exhibition in Germany, showing at the LSK-Galerie the major films that the collective has realized so far. The architecture of the former air-raid shelter, with the long corridor and the numerous small, windowless rooms branching off from it, proves to be highly advantageous for hosting numerous films and a sound installation, allowing an intimate space for every single work. However, in terms of content, the gesture of marginalization is ambivalent.
The exhibition starts with a first chapter Roan-Roan and Connected, that’s how we make Karrabing (2020), a filmic work giving insight into the bureaucratic and brutal mechanisms of two centuries of settler colonialism. Opposed to these official structures is Karrabing’s caring relationship with their land and their understanding of time, connecting different worlds simultaneously: this is expressed through the Dreaming of Indigenous Australians. Relating to the ancestors through oral histories and ceremonial rites, the film interweaves multiple narratives and timelines.
“The collective builds their narratives out of their everyday lives”—with a film practice in between genres (documentary, docufiction, contemporary ethnographic film) and beyond classification, it aims “to show oneself for the other.”¹ The short film cycle in five parts, Day in the Life (2020), made during pandemic-related restrictions maps out the Indigenous community’s struggles. Installed in separate rooms, each of the works—Breakfast, Playtime, Lunch Run, Cocktail Hour, and Takeout Dinner—is informed by mechanisms that craft public opinion, sources such as state radio or television or the officer apparatus. The first chapter questions responsibilities of dealing with nonfunctioning household appliances or going back to the bush and connecting to one’s ancestors and a different way of life. The second chapter, Playtime, lays out the traumatic consequences for the Indigenous Australian community in the years between 1910 and 1970, when the official policy was to forcefully remove the community’s children from their parents, and it touches on the question of who is being held accountable for the cruelties of the Stolen Generations. The confrontation with the ancestors in the bush frequently becomes a part of the narrative, as does the criminalization open, and the question “Who holds the camera?” can only be answered collectively—everyone, including children, is invited to open their smartphone camera.
The film Night Fishing with Ancestors starts with the Indigenous past: fish traps, the ancestors, and the first trades with the Makassans. In the film, Elizabeth A. Povinelli personifies this as Captain Cook, claiming the land and slaughtering people, leaving many traumatized children without parents; as an anthropologist craving gold and diamonds or, most recently, as a miner with a hunger for clean energy, leaving behind an ecological disaster. Learning from the Karrabing about the ancestral land, the collective also puts forward the question: What if the Europeans had never come?
In the accompanying publication, Massimiliano Mollona argues for the Karrabing’s filmic and marginalization of Indigenous community members through bureaucratic state officials. The last chapter, Takeout Dinner, examines the ongoing ecological crises and the struggle for Indigenous land. As the Australian economy became more dependent on mineral extraction and mining in the 1990s and the early years of the new millennium in the Northern Territories, the threat of forced resettlement and ecological disaster in these mining areas also intensified. The extractive practices and the environmental approach taken by colonization leave behind destroyed fauna and flora, a ruined ecological system, which is all the more devastating if this happens on a sacred site, connected to past ancestors. The following rooms in the exhibition, with a sound shower and a timeline starting from 1700, with the Makassans, and 1770, when James Cook and the colonial settlers landed, map the complex histories along political, colonial, cultural, and ancestral threads up to today, thus providing insight into multiple Indigenous struggles. This is followed by a wide range of films, going back to the first significant work, When the Dogs Talked, realized in 2014, allowing for a deeper understanding of Karrabing’s filmic practice, but first and foremost of the Indigenous conditions of being in the world.
The most recent film is presented in Vienna: in the Secession, the curator Bettina Spörr installed Night Fishing with Ancestors (2023) in the gallery upstairs. The narrow staircase shows Karrabing’s characteristic technique of overlaying and blending. Historical photographs and maps, video stills, and texts merge into one another and tell of historical and current injustice, colonial power relations, and the striving for self-determination and independence: “White people only want what is valuable in their eyes,” but the material also hints at how “another history still exists in the sands.” On the front side, in large black letters, stands the central message of the collective’s current practice, “No Storyboard / No Script / We Make Our Films from Our Life and Lands for Our Life and Lands,” which is also the title of the accompanying artist book. As indicated here, the practice of filmmaking is very practice as one of resistance to the colonial and capitalistic dispossession of their land, but one of °“reclaiming the land” through the ritual of connection with the ancestors and the care work related to it; a practice which, importantly, constitutes the collective “as an autonomous political subject.”² And if we look at the current state of the world, it is a deeply needed practice!