Film Exposed

Mikhail Karikis: No Ordinary Protest

Monday 25 January – Sunday 7 February

Combining sound, performance and unscripted debates, Mikhail Karikis’s film takes it cue form the short story The Iron Woman by Ted Hughes. In this story, children are the first to hear an eerie, supernatural noise, which is an emanation of the collective pain of creatures affected by the pollution of the planet. Angered by the complicity and complacency of adults, children take matters into their own hands, infiltrating factories and demanding immediate action against the impending ecological catastrophe.

Karikis adopts this children’s story as an ecofeminist parable and as a lesson in the power of sound to effect physical, psychological and socio-political transformation. He introduced the book to a class of 7-year-old students from an East London school whom he asked to contemplate the world’s ecological future, and harness the power within them to demand change and transform the world

Image: Mikhail Karikis, No Ordinary Protest, 2018. Commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art and Whitechapel Gallery, London. Courtesy Mikhail Karikis