Carriageworks, one of Australia’s largest contemporary multi-arts centres, will present the world premiere of INVOCATION TRILOGY, a major new video work by award-winning Polish Australian artist and filmmaker Kuba Dorabialski reflecting on language, politics and cultural memory; online for free until 10 October 2021.
Conceived through the lens of his biographical ties to Eastern Europe and filmed and performed in Dorabialski’s own fictional Slavic language—designed to be partly intelligible to most Slavic language speakers—INVOCATION TRILOGY investigates what it means to explore memories, real and distorted, as a migrant who now lives in Australia. Through its uneasy mix of brooding earnestness and absurdist comedy, Dorabialski poses the grand and preposterous question: What is this thing we call Eastern Europe?
Curated by Carriageworks Director of Programs Daniel Mudie Cunningham, the work marks the completion of a series developed over the past four years including two short video works and the world premiere of the third and final feature film length work, ‘Connection of the Sticks’.
Beginning in 2017 with the award-winning short video, Floor Dance of Lenin’s Resurrection, Dorabialski sets the tone with a narrative blending history with fiction and the absurd. Leaning heavily on cinematic tradition, the trilogy pulls focus on the turbulent history and fraught boundaries of Eastern Europe from the perspective of a deeply invested onlooker, while embracing and challenging its clichés and stereotypes. The three parts of the trilogy, each grander in scope than the last, considers the making of meaning, spirituality, superstition, and radical politics.
INVOCATION TRILOGY was about to open as a three-channel video installation at Carriageworks as Sydney went into the current lockdown and is set to open physically to the public when Carriageworks reopens.
An artist and curator talk between Dorabialski and Daniel Mudie Cunningham will be streamed online 31 August 2021.
For more detail please visit: https://carriageworks.com.au/