SUPPORT MATERIAL: FILMS

Sidney Myer Fellowship 2026

20 minutes of video

Two films / please watch the first ten minutes of each film:

  1. the deceptively simple need for a home (on other people’s land), 2025

  2. Surveilling a Crime Scene, 2023

the deceptively simple need for a home (on other people’s land), 21m28s, 2025

This work recounts an experience of a childhood spent in rented accommodation. While not uncommon, this account is distinctive for the manner in which it sets out to disrupt the entitlement to housing enshrined in settler-colonial life. It does this by invoking the child’s interpersonal and class circumstances.

Composed of 14 vignettes or episodes—one for each of the houses that the child lived in until leaving school—the work has an underlying feeling of vulnerability despite its humour. To this end, the child is introduced as ‘on the edges’, observing the mother who often rearranges the furniture as ‘though the rearrangement would solve their problems’.

A cumulative unease is created in the work by a fragmentary anecdotal approach that digresses from the steady gaze of the camera. These anecdotes are revealing of historical forces beyond the film’s domestic spaces and suburban terrain. For lodged in memories of make-believe, teenage camaraderie and maturing experiences across a widening geographic range are traces of the locality’s First Nations people and the process of their attempted erasure. As this narrative betrays, the need for a home is ‘deceptively simple’; on one hand, it is instinctive and universal and, on the other, it bears the injustice of non-Indigenous life on stolen land.

Jasmin Stephens, curator of A Deceptively Simple Need, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, 2025

film festivals

  • INTERNATIONAL PREMIER Visions du Reel, short and medium international films (in competition), Nyon, Switzerland, 17-26 April 2026.

exhibitions

  • A Deceptively Simple Need, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, 17 October — 21 December, 2025

  • National Photography Prize, Murray Art Museum, 8 August — 22 November, 2026

  • To the Owner, UTS Gallery, 8 September — 12 December 2026

further reading

credits

  • script, camera, editing, narration: Alana Hunt

  • sound design: Anna John

  • colourist: Final Grade

  • voice recording: David Akerman at Lost Sound

Supported by the Copyright Agency’s Partnerships Commission in collaboration with the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art.

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 current day Australia. The film aligns and overlays what may otherwise seem like discontinuous domains—a dam, tourism, a historical monument, agriculture, a police station, cigarette burns, 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.

A flip-book of the film has also been produced. It contains an accompanying essay by the novelist Fiona Kelly McGregor.

“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

  • the way things are. the way they are going to be. part eight by Collective Misnomer in Denver Colorado, 13 March 2026

  • 16 Days in WA Screening by Waringarri Corporation, Kununurra Picture Garden, 4 December 2025

  • Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, 5 November 2025

  • Department of Fine Art, University of Hyderabad, September 2025

  • lines, multiple infinite, Market Gallery, Glascow, 3 September 2025

  • Untabled online with the Food Art Research Network, 16 August 2025

  • The Treasury, Boorloo/Perth, 10 June 2025

  • Arthshila, Goa, 14 June 2025

  • Sharjah Film Platform: Montage, NYU Abu Dhabi, 2 May 2025

  • 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

  • Badnam Film Festival, Bangalore, 24-26 April, 2025

  • Dharamshala International Film Festival, Dharamshala, November 2024

  • Sharjah Film Platform 7, Sharjah UAE, November 2024 (WINNER Best Short Documentary Film)

  • Revelation Perth International Film Festival, Boorloo/Perth, July 2024

  • Antenna Documentary Film Festival, Sydney, February 2024

exhibitions

  • In Interludes and Transitions, Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale, curated by Sabih Ahmed and Nora Razian, January 30 — May 2, 2026

  • Water Under the Bridge / A Bridge Under Water, curated by The Packet as part of Pure Intention: Singapore Biennale, 31 October 2025 — 29 March 2026

  • Surveilling a Crime Scene, Bundaberg Regional Art Gallery, September - October, 2025 (solo exhibition)

  • Protest is a Creative Act, Museum of Australian Photography, 7 June - 31 August, 2025

  • Surveilling a Crime Scene (and other examinations), Griffith University Art Museum, 17 April - 17 May, 2025 (solo exhibition)

  • 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 (solo exhibition)

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.