Mermaids, or Aiden in Wonderland and Neptune Frost. Pre Screening Performance by Fetle Wondimu Nega
Seventh Cinema (Guest curated by Kori Miles and Lucie Loy)
15
February 2024
15
Feb
2024
Seventh Gallery Lawn
Seventh Cinema (Guest curated by Kori Miles and Lucie Loy)
Mermaids, or Aiden in Wonderland and Neptune Frost. Pre Screening Performance by Fetle Wondimu Nega
15
February 2024
15
February
2024
Seventh Gallery Lawn
We are pleased to introduce Seventh Cinema, a free public cinema season spanning seven weeks.
Teaming up with guest artist Kori Miles, we have curated a series of film programs on a temporary outdoor cinema on the gallery's adjacent lawn. This inaugural season is dedicated to exploring the intersections of neo/colonialism and global climate change, zooming in on global colonial expansion and its persistent effects on the environment, human rights, and cultural landscapes.
Join us for weekly film screenings where each session showcases a short film followed by a feature. Through the films that we have selected, we aim to spotlight the resilience ingrained in the struggles for self-determination within global First Nations and other hegemonised and racialised communities. Themes of storytelling, family, social justice activism, home, and transformation weave through our program, highlighting the powerful and enduring role of struggle and resistance.
See the full Seventh Cinema program here.
꩜ ꩜ ꩜
Fetle Wondimu Nega (also known as Nū) is an Ethiopian-Australian vocalist, producer, and live coder. Her work incorporates non-western musical traditions, improvisational performance, and Afrofuturism, traversing genres from Ambient and Jazz to RnB, Electronic, and Experimental music.
For Seventh Cinema, Fetle will be responding to Afrofuturist film Neptune Frost, with a live coding set featuring ambient soundscapes, archival samples, and improvisational vocals. Come experience the emerging audio visual practice of live code, projected onto our outdoor cinescape from 8.30pm.
꩜ ꩜ ꩜
Mermaids, or Aiden in Wonderland, 2018, 27 minutes. Dir. Karrabing Film Collective.
In the not far future, 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. As he travels with this father and brother across the landscape he confronts two possible futures and pasts.
Neptune Frost, 2021, 95 minutes. Dir. Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman.
Multi-hyphenate, multidisciplinary artist Saul Williams brings his unique dynamism to this Afrofuturist vision, a sci-fi punk musical that’s a visually wondrous amalgamation of themes, ideas, and songs that Williams has explored in his work, notably his 2016 album MartyrLoserKing. Co-directed with the Rwandan-born artist and cinematographer Anisia Uzeyman, the film takes place in the hilltops of Burundi, where a group of escaped coltan miners form an anti-colonialist computer hacker collective. From their camp in an otherworldly e-waste dump, they attempt a takeover of the authoritarian regime exploiting the region's natural resources – and its people. When an intersex runaway and an escaped coltan miner find each other through cosmic forces, their connection sparks glitches within the greater divine circuitry. Set between states of being – past and present, dream and waking life, colonized and free, male and female, memory and prescience – Neptune Frost is an invigorating and empowering direct download to the cerebral cortex and a call to reclaim technology for progressive political ends.
Image Description: This image is film still from Neptune Frost, and features nine Burundi miners spread across rocky terrain mostly playing drums.
We are pleased to introduce Seventh Cinema, a free public cinema season spanning seven weeks.
Teaming up with guest artist Kori Miles, we have curated a series of film programs on a temporary outdoor cinema on the gallery's adjacent lawn. This inaugural season is dedicated to exploring the intersections of neo/colonialism and global climate change, zooming in on global colonial expansion and its persistent effects on the environment, human rights, and cultural landscapes.
Join us for weekly film screenings where each session showcases a short film followed by a feature. Through the films that we have selected, we aim to spotlight the resilience ingrained in the struggles for self-determination within global First Nations and other hegemonised and racialised communities. Themes of storytelling, family, social justice activism, home, and transformation weave through our program, highlighting the powerful and enduring role of struggle and resistance.
See the full Seventh Cinema program here.
꩜ ꩜ ꩜
Fetle Wondimu Nega (also known as Nū) is an Ethiopian-Australian vocalist, producer, and live coder. Her work incorporates non-western musical traditions, improvisational performance, and Afrofuturism, traversing genres from Ambient and Jazz to RnB, Electronic, and Experimental music.
For Seventh Cinema, Fetle will be responding to Afrofuturist film Neptune Frost, with a live coding set featuring ambient soundscapes, archival samples, and improvisational vocals. Come experience the emerging audio visual practice of live code, projected onto our outdoor cinescape from 8.30pm.
꩜ ꩜ ꩜
Mermaids, or Aiden in Wonderland, 2018, 27 minutes. Dir. Karrabing Film Collective.
In the not far future, 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. As he travels with this father and brother across the landscape he confronts two possible futures and pasts.
Neptune Frost, 2021, 95 minutes. Dir. Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman.
Multi-hyphenate, multidisciplinary artist Saul Williams brings his unique dynamism to this Afrofuturist vision, a sci-fi punk musical that’s a visually wondrous amalgamation of themes, ideas, and songs that Williams has explored in his work, notably his 2016 album MartyrLoserKing. Co-directed with the Rwandan-born artist and cinematographer Anisia Uzeyman, the film takes place in the hilltops of Burundi, where a group of escaped coltan miners form an anti-colonialist computer hacker collective. From their camp in an otherworldly e-waste dump, they attempt a takeover of the authoritarian regime exploiting the region's natural resources – and its people. When an intersex runaway and an escaped coltan miner find each other through cosmic forces, their connection sparks glitches within the greater divine circuitry. Set between states of being – past and present, dream and waking life, colonized and free, male and female, memory and prescience – Neptune Frost is an invigorating and empowering direct download to the cerebral cortex and a call to reclaim technology for progressive political ends.
Kori Miles
Kori is an interdisciplinary and process-based takataapui artist, currently working and living on sacred Wurundjeri land in Naarm/Melbourne. They are of Maaori (Ngaati Raukawa, Ngaati Ahuru, Tainui/Waikato), Italian, Scottish & Anglo-Celtic descent, but born and raised in so-called Australia. They predominantly utilise performance, installation, sculpture, photography, video and poetry as mediums to explore/articulate ideas, knowledge and stories.
Kori’s practice is guided by the stories of Maaui—the trickster demigod of Maaori mythology—and how Maaui’s clever wit combined with the powers of shape-shifting and interdimensional travel are used to undermine structural authority and cause a paradigm shift in power distribution - a social and systemic change that benefits those with less privilege and access. Kori’s practice manifests visions that confront the ongoing damage of colonial and heteronormative social structures, whilst concurrently fostering a space for contemplation on transgression, eroticism, liberation, humour, healing, regeneration and resilience.
Lucie Loy
Lucie Loy is a multi-disciplinary artist, curator and writer (currently) based in Northern NSW and Naarm (Melbourne). Alongside her independent practice which spans visual art, publishing, writing and curating she has committed much of her professional capacity to platforming independent, artist-led and experimental practice. Through her work with artist-run projects locally and internationally, Lucie has explored notions of the ‘artist-led’, platforming the importance of art and artists critically and creatively addressing global and social struggles. Working with the aesthetics of hope, resistance and imagination, as well as through policy advocacy, activism and frustrating bureaucratic frameworks, Lucie’s practice and work seeks to explore the intersection of art, political ecology, social and environmental justice and postcolonial globalisation. Lucie is interested in collaboration, ideas of the commons and critical, transdisciplinary projects. Her recent research explores biopolitics, notions of power and the philosophies and contexts of post-truth.