This is how Soda_Jerk describe their new film TERROR NULLIUS: “A 360-degree camera pan from Wake in Fright arrives into the dusty horizon of the 1971 film Walkabout, where the children are listening on the radio to news of Whitlam’s 1975 dismissal. The refugees from the movie Lucky Miles ominously wash ashore a beach from Romper Stomper.”
The two-person art collective position TERROR NULLIUS as an unwieldy road movie, using acts of sampling and appropriation to tour through, while also challenging, white Australian cinema and history.
Showing at ACMI, TERROR NULLIUS creates a new narrative space that blends cinematic fiction and historical fact. In essence, Soda_Jerk look critically at the narratives we create.
“As a nation the films we make and stories we tell are never innocent, they are always implicated in certain relations of power and understandings of history,” explain the artists.
These samples include the apocalyptic desert camps of Mad Max 2, detention centre debates, the Babadook house and Mel Gibson’s expletive-laden telephone rant to his ex-partner. While the humour can be imagined, the duo uses appropriation to question the “white, hyper-masculine, heteronormative ‘heroes’ of Australian cinema and the casual and violent misogyny they have embodied both on and beyond the screen.”
This demand for accountability also addresses Australia’s current and historical racism and nationalism. Soda_Jerk summarises the film like this: “TERROR NULLIUS is a provocation for these politically conservative times. We intend for it to be both dark and hopeful, and funny and necessary.”
TERROR NULLIUS
Soda_Jerk
Australian Centre for the Moving Image
20 March – 1 July
65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art is an extraordinary account of the unique art of this continent, published alongside a landmark exhibition at the Potter Museum of Art. Necessary and urgent, it tells the story of Indigenous Australian art; a new art history unlike anything we’ve seen. For Jane O’Sullivan, it’s a remarkable and must-read book.
In a new series of illustrated postcards available as a free gift with purchase only at the Art Guide Bookstore, Oslo Davis takes on classic and contemporary art terms and genres and reimagines what they could be referring to.
With so much to choose from, we’ve rounded up the major summer exhibitions in each capital city, open all summer long. Spanning Yayoi Kusama, Magritte, the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, and many more.
Radical Textiles, A new exhibition at the Art Gallery of South Australia, shows us how textiles evoke material memories while keeping the radical lineage of needle and thread alive.
Developed in 2022 by Artback NT as part of Apmere Mparntwe—the Australian Ceramics Triennale— touring exhibition Clay on Country, showing now at New England Regional Art Museum, showcases the diversity of ceramics in the Central Desert.
Ahead of the National Gallery of Victoria’s major retrospective on singular Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, we invited four artists to respond to the influence of Kusama on their own practice—and meditate on what her work means to them.
