Surveilling a Crime Scene
21m58s, 2023
Winner Best Short Documentary, Sharjah Film Platform 7, 2024
Shot on Super 8mm film, Surveilling a Crime Scene examines the materialization of non-Indigenous life on Miriwoong Country—through the town of Kununurra and its surrounds, in the remote north-west of Australia. The film aligns and overlays what may otherwise seem like discontinuous domains—a dam, tourism, a historical monument, agriculture, a police station, bureaucratic forms—to produce a silhouette of tools, techniques, and procedures of power and oppression.
Surveilling a Crime Scene delivers a gentle yet powerful tapestry of evidence that recognises colonisation not as history but as a continuous and present violence, one that is deceptively ordinary.
In 2023 a flip-book of the film has also been produced. It contains an accompanying essay by the novelist Fiona Kelly McGregor.
film trailer / opening sequence
total duration 21m58s // shot on super 8mm film
“Hunt by contrast speaks with a gentle, probing pointedness. Her delivery is spacious, pausing for effect, allowing the footage to also speak for itself. This text-narration is a rich blend of facts and commentary chronicling the history of pastoral grabs in the region (namely through the Durack and Forrest dynasties) and the push for development leading to the much lauded and heavily subsidised Ord River Irrigation Scheme of last century. Citing the scheme’s steep imbalance between investment and return, Hunt surmises, ‘The colony is a welfare recipient / always was, always will be.’ Elsewhere she mentions the great dream of a Kimberley food bowl culminating with the inedible sandalwood tree. Her deft economy of words undercuts.”
Maurice O’Riordan for Artlink
“Her film Surveilling a Crime Scene tells the story of Kununurra (the town where she lived) and its surrounds in north Western Australia, charting its colonial history and finding traces of its colonial violence in the fabric of the town: in the landscape, in its economy and infrastructure, in people’s conversation. Using a mix of archival and new images shot in Super 8, all grainy and pastel coloured, the artist illustrates how settlers rearranged the landscape to fit their expansionist narrative in the 1960s and 70s. A mountain was blasted apart, to make way for the town. Then came a large dam that constricts a river and holds the main reservoir. The key objective of the Ord River Irrigation Scheme was to turn Kununurra into a food bowl, a paradise where modern agriculture, irrigation and European know-how would maximise land exploitation. It turned out to be a colossal and costly failure.”
régine debatty in We Make Money Not Art
“One of Hunt's underlying competencies is her seamless weaving of media forms including film, photography and printed matter with participatory practices. Her multidisciplinary approach allows her to navigate the nuanced layers of socio-political issues to offer a tapestry of knowledge systems for audiences to engage with…The work revisits the fault lines of colonial modernities, to talk about how the events of displacement and dispossession are not historic but enacted and re-enacted over and again, through daily life in a settler colony like Australia.”
Dilpreet Bhullar in Stir World
further reading
screenings
Recompositions: The Place We Do Not Know Is The Place We Are Looking For, West Space / Liquid Architecture, Naarm/Melbourne, 21 February 2025
Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art, Delhi, 22 January 2025
Museum of Art and Photography, Bangalore, 4 January 2025
Kununurra Picture Gardens, 5 July 2024
film festivals
Dharamshala International Film Festival, November 2024
Sharjah Film Platform 7, November 2024 (WINNER Best Short Documentary Film)
Revelation Perth International Film Festival, July 2024
Antenna Documentary Film Festival, Sydney, February 2024
exhibitions
Photosynthesisers: Women and the lens, Te Uru Waitakere Contemporary Gallery, Aotearoa / New Zealand, 16 February - 25 May, 2025
Borrowed Landscapes, Mosman Art Gallery, 18 October 2024 - 4 February 2025
Dreams Nursed in Darkness, Wollongong Art Gallery, 7 September - 24 November 2024
like bloodthirsty mosquitoes: Jack Green and Alana Hunt, The Cross Art Projects, 31 August - 28 September, 2024
like bloodthirsty mosquitoes: Jack Green and Alana Hunt, Watch This Space, 17 May - 1 June 2024
Surveilling a Crime Scene, Northern Centre for Contemporary Art, 5 October - 11 November 2023
credits
total duration: 21m58s
script, direction, camera, edit: Alana Hunt
sound: Anna John
colour grading: Peter Hatzipavlis
Surveiling a Crime Scene premiered in a solo exhibition at the Northern Centre for Contemporary Art, Darwin October 2023 and was supported by the Sheila Foundation’s Michela and Adrian Fini Fellowship and the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.
