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Screening: Soda_Jerk, TERROR NULLIUS

About

Australian super-animators Soda_Jerk present their newest work, TERROR NULLIUS, in the Edlis Neeson Theater. Harnessing a vast array of moving image media technologies and a wild abandon for appropriation, the collective destabilizes our favorite moments from the archive of popular movies, using their components to create entirely new narratives, speculative histories, and hilarious political critique.

TERROR NULLIUS (2018, HD video, 54 minutes) is a political revenge fable that offers an un-writing of Australian national mythology. This experimental sample-based film works entirely within and against the official archive to achieve a queering and othering of Australian cinema. Part political satire, eco-horror, and road movie, TERROR NULLIUS is a world in which minorities and animals conspire, and not-so-nice white guys finish last. Where idyllic beaches host race-riots, governments poll love-rights, and the perils of hypermasculinity are overshadowed only by the enduring horror of Australia's colonizing myth of terra nullius.

Preceded by The Was (2016; digital video, 14 minutes) by Soda_Jerk & The Avalanches

About the Artists

Formed in Sydney in 2002, Soda_Jerk is a two-person art collective working at the intersection of documentary and speculative fiction. Their archival practice takes the form of films, video installations, cut-up texts, and lecture performances. Based in New York since 2012, they have exhibited in galleries, cinemas, torrent sites, and institutions including the Barbican Centre, London; Videotage, Hong Kong; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Dortmund, Germany; the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne; and Anthology Film Archives, New York.