Return to menu

It goes both ways: moving images in different times and places
Spaced 2 Future Recall 2015 - Perth International Arts Festival
Western Australian Museum, Perth
18 February–30 March 2015
A collaborative filmic conversation, created by Lily, with five artist filmmakers who have all worked in and out of the Pilbara, including Tyson Morawin, Glen Stasuik, Curtis Taylor and Fiona Walsh.


Installation view, It goes both ways: moving images in different times and places
Western Australian Museum, Perth Photo: Lily Hibberd

Films and photographs are powerful tools for looking back and forward. Some images lead us to ask the deeper question of how we belong to a place, because through such pictures we're looking back from elsewhere, far away from home. This is when moving images make or renew memories and connections with people and places, whether near or far.

It goes both ways: moving images in different times and places features the films, photographs and recorded conversations of Lily Hibberd, Tyson Mowarin, Glen Stasiuk, Curtis Taylor and Fiona Walsh, encountered during Lily's Spaced 2 residency, her collaboration with Martumili Artists spanning 2013-14, and over four years of making art in Western Australia. Lily's installation gather theses artists' works to present their stories in a conversation about filmmaking in and out of the Pilbara – about moving and sharing memories across many places and times.


Installation view, It goes both ways: moving images in different times and places
Western Australian Museum, Perth Photo: Lily Hibberd



Central to It goes both ways: moving images in different times and places is a suite of films made in the Pilbara. In Footprints in the Sand: Jinna Mitinu Barnunga - The Last of the Nomads (2006), director Glen Stasiuk retells the story of Warri and Yatungka, Martu couple who left their communities and lived in the Gibson Desert for over 40 years. Contemporary interviews are combined with archive footage from 1977. The film is told through the voices of Warri and Yatungka's son, Geoffrey Stewart (Yullala Boss) and other community members, as they journey back to Yullala's birthplace in the desert. Yullala's homecoming is a ceremonial event.



Fiona Walsh's Handing back the past: A journey to Martu country with old photos (2012), documents Fiona's return to the Western Desert Martu community of Parnngurr with more than 1,400 photos she took in the 1980s-90s. This film charts continuity and change over 20 years in social and ecological environments. As she travels, Fiona is anxious about bridging cultural worlds and the wide span of 20 years. Will these pictures be of interest to Martu people in a world of rapid change?



Mamu (2010), written and directed by Curtis Taylor, portrays the tale of a young disillusioned Martu who man breaks cultural protocol by sharing photos of powerful rock paintings on Facebook and faces the frightening consequences.



Tyson Mowarin's Ngurra Wangaggu – Country Talking (2013), centres on a fishing trip but it's a reconnection, a continuing practice or part of everyday life. Ngurra Wanggagu is a modern and ancient love story. Presented in cinematic style, with stunning landscape time lapses as well as intimate one-on-one shots to explore the wider and more personal connections between a family and their country, as well as their connections with each other.



The Phone Booth Project (2012) is a collaboration between Lily Hibberd and Curtis Taylor and the Martu communities of Punmu and Parnngurr that relates the significance of phone booths for people in the Western Desert, especially in keeping dispersed families connected. Martu community members were actively involved in this retelling, also communicating diverse aspects of life in remote Australia.


Woven across the four other monitors in the installation are films made in many other places: in Sydney, Alice Springs, on Wadjemup (Rottnest Island), in Pernambuco, Brazil and Murujaga, on the Burrup peninsula in West Pilbara. Completing the scenario, It goes both ways presents seven prints from Tyson Mowarin's series All That I See, 365 Project, part of his ongoing documentation of many travels and memories of encountering special people and places – one shot and one story for each day of a year. Of all the representations here, it could be this still image that moves us the most: to feel the coming storm under the foreboding sky in Day 75, Underneath that cloud wave in the dust, red pindan and burnt ground.