3 min promotional trailer of Gudirr Gudirr, a multi screen installation version of Dalisa Pigram's dance solo of the same name, directed by Vernon Ah Kee for Marrugeku. Gudirr Gudirr premiered at The National— New Australian Art 2021, commissioned and presented by Carriageworks.
Gudirr Gudirr Installation
Vernon Ah Kee, Dalisa Pigram and Marrugeku
16 May
Start: 10am
Finish: 4pm
Location: Cossack Bond Store
Ages: 14+
Free Event
Tickets: N/A, Walk-ins welcome
GUDIRR GUDIRR is a multi-channel video and sound installation directed by Vernon Ah Kee and filmed on location in Rubibi (Broome) in the Kimberley region of Western Australia for Marrugeku. This striking three-screen installation re-imagines the original solo dance performance by movement artist Dalisa Pigram conceived together with Patrick Dodson.
Gudirr Gudirr (the guwayi bird) calls when the tide is turning — to miss the call is to drown. By turns hesitant, restless, resilient and angry, Gudirr Gudirr lights a path from a broken past through a fragile present and towards an uncertain future.
Considering the legacy of Australia’s history for Aboriginal people in northwest Australia today Gudirr Gudirr asks: what does it take to decolonise Aboriginal peoples’ minds, to unlock doors and to face cultural change? The installation calls a warning to a community facing massive industrialisation on traditional lands, loss of language and major gaps between Indigenous and non-Indigenous wellbeing. Expressing a physicality borne of their shared Asian–Indigenous identity, Ah Kee and Pigram capture the warning call of the wader bird in an intimate gestural language of dance and portraiture and text based imagery.
Commissioned by Carriageworks and Marrugeku for The National 2021: New Australian Art.
It’s a powerful and mounting cry – both an alarm and a call to listen.
ArtsHub"In her vigorous, fluid movements and spoken word, Pigram embodies the anger and exhaustion of generations of displaced and disadvantaged communities in the Kimberley." " a stirring declaration of strength and resilience."
The ConversationA powerful, visceral film shot in Broome that moves between the dance studio and the beach at dawn, where the cry of the Guwayi bird warns of a turning tide.
BroadsheetThe coming together of these two important contemporary artists results in a powerful performance that cuts deep to the core of the devastating impact of colonisation on Aboriginal people in the past, and now.
A rich lifeA darkly comic laceration of racism in this country wrapped up in the astounding beauty of this continent, it’s one of the best films we’ve seen so far this year, and you’ll easily lose half an hour or more in its astounding gravitational pull.
Time Out
Warnings: Cultural and content warning: Gudirr Gudirr contains truth-telling about our history in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. This video contains coarse language, depictions of violence, references to self-harm and youth suicide. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander viewers are advised this work contains the images of people who have passed away
Gudirr Gudirr was funded by the Australia Council for the Arts. Marrugeku is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its art funding and advisory body; the NSW Government through Create NSW and the WA State Government through the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries.