Naina Sen
Naina Sen with Bábbarra Women's Centre,
Mabbúlarr, 2023, Film
Naina Sen x Joy Bulanjdjan Garlbin x Josephine Wamutjan James
Mabbúlarr is a collaboration between filmmaker and video artist Naina Sen and textile and multimedia artist Josephine James and her mother, senior Kunibídji elder Joy Garlbin, traditional owner of Maningrida.
Joy and Josephine work with Bábbarra Women's Centre in textile art to preserve stories linked with country, clan totems and Djang (ancestral creator beings).
Bábbarra Women’s Centre is located in Maningrida, homeland of the Kunibídji people in West Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory. Bábbarra is one of the oldest continuously operating Indigenous textile enterprises in Australia. A space run by women, for women. A diverse range of cultural stories from 8 languages, 25 artists and over 80 design stories.
Mabbúlarr tells the story of the turtle marláddja (green sea turtle) and the stingray marnandjúbba (cowtail stingray). Exploring and combining the interplay between textile art and moving image, the film is an abstracted story linking the traditional hunting method of the sea turtle to the ceremonial dance, MiÍddjarn.
This work was originally was commissioned by Creative Accomplice as part of the NT Travelling Film Festival's Water Tower Series. This project was assisted by the Australian Government through the Festivals Australia program.
128 Gertrude St, Fitzroy. (SUKU)
[Mabbúlarr]
6PM - 12AM
Naina Sen, VORTEX, 2023
Video with playlist
In Vortex, filmmaker and video artist Naina Sen, explores the tangible and intangible notions of being suspended between time and place. Experimenting with film, paint, oil and milk, this is a deeply personal work borne of the ebbs and flows of longing and displacement with being indefinitely separated from her family and her sense of home, through the pandemic
On a larger scale the work considers notions of Isolation, connection, disruption, displacement, identity and the ever changing porosity of human, social and political boundaries
This work was originally was commissioned by Creative Accomplice as part of the NT Travelling Film Festival's Water Tower Series. This project was assisted by the Australian Government through the Festivals Australia program
122 Gertrude St, Fitzroy
(Oigall Progjects)
[VORTEX]
Artist Bio
Born and brought up in New Delhi, India, Naina Sen is a Walkley and AACTA nominated filmmaker and video artist.
Based on the lands of the Larrakia People in Darwin, Naina has collaborated extensively with artists in remote Aboriginal communities in North-East Arnhem Land and the Central Desert in the Northern Territory for the last 12 years.
A practice built on long-term cross-cultural and inter-cultural collaboration and storytelling, Naina works across documentary, installation, and live projection and uses image making to explore gender, cultural identity, and equity, place, and memory, privileging First Nations and South Asian and South East Asian diasporic narratives