Seventh Cinema → Mermaids, or Aiden in Wonderland and Neptune Frost. Pre Screening Performance by Fetle Wondimu Nega

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.

Please visit our website for the full program.

꩜ ꩜ ꩜

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.