2015 Visible Award

The Karrabing Film Collective is a grassroots Indigenous-based media group. Filmmaking provides a means of self-organization and social analysis for the Karrabing. Screenings and publications allow the Karrabing to develop local artistic languages and forms and allow audiences to understand new forms of collective Indigenous agency.Their medium is a form of survivance – a refusal

In 2009, some Karrabing boated to their remote country in northern Australia. Half got off at one beach, the other half continuing down the coast. When the first group returned to the beach, the boat was nowhere in sight. Just before a swarm of mosquitoes—bred in inland swamps—overtook them, the boat materialised. It had been stranded down the coast, the motor refusing to start. Corroded wiring, angry ancestors, racialised capital, or Jesus: Salt comprises five ten-minute films. Each film steps seamlessly from one geography of explanation to the next as if through a strange door. Characters get on a boat in a backyard and step out onto a beach.

Karrabing is not a place or a people. Karrabing refers to the state when the vast coastal tides are at their lowest and is contrasted to karrakal, when the tides at their highest. What existed in 1984 were a group of interrelated families who had been interned on the Belyuen Community in the 1940s. The Australian government shifted course in the late 1970s from Indigenous assimilation to so-called Indigenous self-determination. Land claim hearings and cultural heritage protection were heralded as the cornerstone of this new era of social justice.

On November 16th, 2019, the Public Jury of the fifth edition of the Visible Award, in collaboration with Lafayette Anticipations, took place at the Hôtel de Ville in Paris, gathering over 200 people in a debate around the ten shortlisted projects. The jury occupied for a day—once again and since 2013—the conceptual and physical space of an actual parliament,

The Queens Museum has a long-standing commitment to socially engaged art, and its New York City Building was the location of early meetings of the United Nations from 1946 to 1950, making it ideally suited to host Visible’s Temporary Parliament.