Do Rocks Listen? is a solo exhibition by the Karrabing Film Collective, a grassroots Indigenous media group, based in Australia’s Northern Territory, who create films and art installations as a way to analyze contemporary settler colonialism, and through these depictions, challenge its grip. Their films employ a highly inventive cinematic language that provokes disorientation and (mis)understandings of the multileveled worlds in which Indigenous Australian families dwell.
Do Rocks Listen? presents the first comprehensive survey of the Karrabing Film Collective’s films in Asia, by converting the ICA’s gallery into a microcinema and via virtual screenings online. The exhibition is organized into four screening series. The third “Future Present” series introduces an exploration of dystopian science fiction and soundscapes, which are nevertheless grounded in present day realities.
In English and Australian Aboriginal English with Chinese subtitles.
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The Mermaids, or Aiden in Wonderland, 2018
Video (single channel, color, sound); 26’41”
Aiden, a young Indigenous man who was stolen as a baby to be part of a medical experiment to save the white people, is released back into an unfamiliar world to his uncle and brother. As they travel across a ravaged landscape, nevertheless filled with ancestors and other survivors of the more-than-human world, Aiden confronts two possible futures and pasts.
Day in the Life, 2020
Video (single channel, color, sound); 32’50”
Day in the Life moves through five vignettes—Breakfast, Play Break, Lunch, Cocktail Hour, and Takeout Dinner—dramatizing and satirizing an ordinary day in the lives of a small rural Indigenous community.
In conjunction with Do Rocks Listen? an exhibition by Karrabing Film Collective
Do Rocks Listen? an exhibition by Karrabing Film Collective and related events are presented as the first season of Another Knowledge Is Possible (2021-23), a biennial artistic research program organized by the ICA at NYU Shanghai. From Fall 2021 through Spring 2023, the ICA will explore other knowledges that have been neglected or repressed and ask if it is possible for a deep decolonization of thought to reclaim these ways of knowing?
