the ghost of Mr Bawky by Esther Carlin

Join us for the Naarm (Melbourne) premiere screening of the ghost of Mr Bawky (2025) by Esther Carlin.

the ghost of Mr Bawky is a cinematic portrait of the artist's father that blurs the boundaries between fiction and reality to explore the role of silence in Australian life. The artist’s father went to film school when she was a baby and made a film about a boy with an absent father. This film was based on his own experience growing up without a father. 28 years later, the artist revisited this material. Confronting the taboo of suicide, the ghost of Mr Bawky weaves together past and present, shedding light on the lingering ghosts that inhabit a family home. Winner of the 2026 Gosford Art Prize Moving Image Art Award, the work formally dissects the act of filmmaking in order to create a new image—one that allows for a version of the truth to live in the open.    

The screening will be followed by a conversation with the artist and accompanied by a newly commissioned essay by writer and curator Sophie Rose.  

Esther Carlin is an artist and filmmaker. She makes film-based installations that draw on her training in art and anthropology. Using critical ethnographic research methods, she develops artworks that articulate the importance of poetics as a way of examining specific histories and sites, while asking questions of subject-making, imaging and representation. She was the recipient of the 2022 Combined Arts John Monash Scholarship and holds a Master of Art Practice – Critical Tools from Erg (école de recherche graphique – école supérieure des arts), Brussels. She organises speaking from the I eye, an international program of experimental film screenings and readings that connects artists, writers and audiences between Brussels and Naarm/Melbourne.

Sophie Rose is a curator and arts writer working on Gadigal Country. She is currently Assistant Curator, International Art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. She has previously held curatorial positions at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) and Artspace, Sydney, and has contributed to various exhibitions, programs, and publications at MoMA PS1, SITE Santa Fe International Biennial, Adelaide Biennial, the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, and Brief Histories, New York. Alongside her curatorial practice, she has contributed critical and scholarly writing for publications such as e-flux Journal, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, Art Asia Pacific, and Un Magazine, and was the editor of the book of artist interviews Glot: Four Conversations on Voice.