AUDIO DESCRIPTION #6
CRYING FILM

Crying
Kuba Dorabialski
Curated by Daniel Mudie Cunningham
August 17 - September 22 2023
Verge Gallery, University of Sydney, Gadigal Country

This is a video work with sound, projected on a freestanding wall at approximately 2 metres tall and 3 metres wide. Please note that this is not an audio described video. This is a description of the content.

The video is shot in black and white, resembling a grainy 16mm film from the 1970s and 1980s. The audio consists of a voice-over interview, accompanied by a slow and gentle bossa nova soundtrack that gradually becomes louder and fuller as the video plays. The video loops and has a duration of approximately 12 minutes.

The video alternates between two narratives, one which is of Jolanta (pronounced Yo-LAhn-tah), a blonde Polish woman in her 30s leaving an apartment block with her moustachioed husband Mikołaj (pronounced Mee-kOE-eye) to take him to work. They drive a 1986 Toyota sedan through rural Central West New South Wales landscapes until they arrive at a large timber mill. Mikołaj gets out of the car and smokes a cigarette while Jolanta drives off. Eventually, she arrives at a radiata pine plantation. She parks the car, takes a swig of vodka from a bottle in the boot, and walks along a dirt path. After a while she stops and looks out over a clearing, where a murmuration of thousands of starlings flies through the sky, bringing Jolanta to tears.

The second narrative, intercut with the first, is of Mikołaj as he skis through a snowy landscape pulling behind him a sled filled with huge amounts of rustic metal equipment. He eventually arrives at a small hidden clearing covered in snow, among some native Australian trees and shrubs, where he begins assembling his various decaying and roughly constructed materials. We see him pour a large barrel into a large rusty metal can. He puts together some tarnished copper pipes and old, battered pots, resting things precariously on logs and plastic boxes. At this stage, it is unclear what he is doing. He occasionally comically glances around to check forpeople, as he is hiding and nervous. Eventually, he starts a small gas stove and begins heating the rusty metal can. It becomes apparent that he is distilling alcohol. As the clear liquid slowly drips into a series of jars, he takes swigs from them, coughing and spluttering to keep the high-proof alcohol down. 

Mikołaj is played by the artist Kuba Dorabialski. This ficto-documentary is loosely based on the experience of that artist’s relatives who have migrated to Australia.This story is one of apprehension, sadness, and bitterness. At its core, it explores what it means to be a homesick migrant on stolen country. Asserting a migrant’s identity in a colonised land is a fraught act; as a Polish migrant living in Australia, this is the topical concern that Kuba’s practice addresses. This video is also the first of Spirytus Diptych, two video works that examine the cultural and psychic history of alcohol and its consumption by humans.