Date: 04.09.2025 — 11.09.2025
Beginning: 19:00
We live in a world in which many realities overlap. They intersect and merge, but also pass each other by. Sometimes, they are conflicting, in others they are complimentary. The idea of a stable past and present collapses under the weight of voices and images which were, for centuries, deliberately silenced and made invisible in the name of a unified world, universal truth and a singular reality. These voices and images often embody worlds which are unthinkable within the homogenised worldview of Western society – their forms and processes are unknown, and for many unimaginable.
The next chapter in the screening series Beyond Belief presents a selection of artists’ films, which address the past and future of communities which, in their bodies and their everyday lives, bear the marks of Western dominance. Despite this, they preserve their own culture, stories and metaphysical frameworks, which defy hegemonic Western logic. From the perspective of white modernity, the Other worlds that this curatorial series attempts to capture, may look like fiction, allegory or alternative realities. They represent, however, fully real forms of existence, which are intertwined with both ancestral legacies and visions of the future. In these narratives, time and its relationship to bodies, human and non-human, or to landscapes, are not as linear or unambiguous as in the European cultural tradition.
The layering of worlds, narratives and contexts can also be represented by the mask, a recurring symbol in each of the selected films. The mask represents a paradoxical, dynamic play with identity and the complex ambiguity of phenomena. It isn’t merely an object or prop, but a medium that makes it possible to envision the invisible and manifest the unthinkable. Masks create openings to different worlds, stories and ways of living (and dying), but at the same time they are their bearer and narrator – a medium for connecting to historical and future memory. This touches on another shared motif in each of the selected films, a speculative and dynamic approach to memory – archiving – remembering and knowing.
Karrabing Film Collective, formed of indigenous peoples from Western Australia the Northern Territory and American anthropologist and theoretician Elizabeth Povinelli, arose from necessity to protect of their land and home from the logic and expansionist practices of settler colonialism. The term Karrabing comes from the expression for the lowest water level between high and low tide, but also expresses the need to defend the diversity of tribal and personal identity and imagination. These are being standardised and erased by colonialism’s drive towards the mapping and exploitation of the land, and it is these that the collective’s films and artistic practice aims to preserve. Their method, however, is not an archiving practise as it would be understand in a European context, but rather a way of surviving under contemporary conditions of globalised neoliberalism. The resulting films do not aim to capture the intangible or everyday or metaphysical life of indigenous people and their ancestors, but instead to highlight survival strategies for a world where local communities have limited resources at their disposal, and where there are always multiple realities and narratives overlapping.
Karrabing Film Collective’s working method can be described as speculative, fictional or improvisational realism. Their films’ narratives grow out of group discussions and often develop organically throughout the filmmaking process. Filming takes place without a script, storyboard or expensive equipment. Their most recent film using this approach, Night Fishing with Ancestors (2023), is being screened five years after the presentation of Karrabing Collective’s works Wutharr – Saltwater Dreams (2014) and When the Dogs Talked (2016) in the third part of etc. gallery’s programme Politics of Truth – Image of the Other curated by Alžběta Bačíková and Anna Remešová. Night Fishing with Ancestors problematises the arrival of Makassar traders at the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries, the appearance of James Cook in 1770 and the centuries of colonisation of the various indigenous lands, which continues today by means of the climate crisis and mineral extraction. The film envisions an alternative history, one in which there was no occupation of the land by European colonisers, but instead peaceful, reciprocal exchange with the Makassar traders.
Dakar (2018) and Kinshasa (2018) – two films from South African filmmaker, sculptor and performance artist Francois Knoetze’s series Core Dump (2018–2019) – are dystopian future visions of the eponymous capitals of Senegal and Congo. The selected parts function as visual archives, but rather than being silent, dusty repositories of history, they again depict the strategies for survival necessary in places violently colonised by a technocratic market system. This active approach to the archive as mediator of history and memory is also apparent in the projects of the artist duo Lo-Def Film Factory, which Knoetze formed with Amy Louise Wilson. From an experimental video art workshop, which projects their films in public space, they have expanded their practice to include creative workshops across moving images, DIY filmmaking, storytelling and performance. These form a key part of their practice, in which they collaborate with people from different social groups in an open, creative process. Through dialog, they create a specific speculative-realist archive that is able to reflect the stories and images of the wider community.
In his own films, Knoetze works with found footage, documentation of performance events and recorded interviews, through which he critically examines technology and its associated ideologies. While in the Western world, technology symbolises progress and social power, in exploited regions it creates multiple layers of toxic waste, which result from both the extraction of mineral resources essential for these technologies, and from their disposal, when global consumers replace them with newer models. In his films, as well as in gallery and stage installations, the artist repurposes discarded machines into sculptures or costumes and masks, which are essential characters in his narrative. These entities – masks – on the border between object and subject, embody the transformative power of colonialism and technology, but at the same time provoke a new social order.
In The Boat People (2020), Vietnamese-American artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen presents a vision of the future in which a group of five children – presumably the last people alive – sail on seas and explore desert islands. Their goal is to discover the world’s stories, which they have not experienced themselves, through the objects that are left behind. The film examines the issue of memory and offers its own particular form of archiving and remembrance. This takes place through objects that the group of children carve from wood in an attempt to piece together the history they are trying to understand. The whole process ends with the burning of the reproduced objects, changing their reality yet again.
Nguyen’s work is within the genre of artistic research, something already apparent in the title of the film. The term ‘boat people’ originally referred to Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees, who used small boats to escape the so-called Vietnam War. In his work, Nguyen reflects on the traumas of people who faced colonial and wartime violence through their lives, and creates from it a speculative archive of historical events based on the memories of these oppressed communities. His work stands in for erased historical memory. For him, the act memorialising and narrating becomes not only a form of resistance, but also a means of healing.
Sára Märc
Selected films:
Karrabing Film Collective: Night Fishing with Ancestors, 2023, 24’17’’
Francois Knoetze: Kinshasa, 2018, 12’42’’, Dakar, 2018, 12’12’’
Tuan Andrew Nguyen: The Boat People, 2020, 20’
Screening in etc. gallery: 4th September 2025, 7 pm.
Online screening: 5 – 11 September 2025
Curator: Sára Märc
Graphic design: Nela Klímová
Translation and subtitle timing: Markéta Effenbergerová
Czech proofreading: Michal Jurza
English translation and proofreading: John Hill
Production: Tereza Vinklárková, Nela Klajbanová
Web support: Ondřej Roztočil
The project is supported by the City of Prague, Prague 2 District, and the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic.
