Anti-Ethnography is a selection of video works which examines the violence inherent in the ethnographic impulse and unveils the absurd fetishism underpinning the discipline. For Indigenous peoples the camera is a dangerous weapon, one that has been wielded against us since the device’s inception. Anthropology’s obsession with preserving images of our “vanishing” cultures, through ethnographic films or archives filled with boxes of our ancestors’ remains, has long been a tool used to colonise and oppress Indigenous peoples.

By relegating our identities to the past, and forcing us to authenticate ourselves through this past, our existence as contemporary individuals living in a colonised land is denied. It is in this sense that ethnography confines Indigenous agency.

The anthropologist’s encapsulating gaze ignores the fact that for Indigenous communities tradition is not an immutable set of truths handed down by revelation, but a set of ever-evolving social practices whose continuity cannot be repaired by preservation, only elaborated through struggle, and finally achieved under conditions of genuine self-determination.

⟼ Curated by Adam Khalil

Young Winnetou (trailer)
DE 2022, 2’
German

Sioux Ghost Dance
⟼ Thomas Edison
US 1894, 1’
Silent

Welcome to the Third World
⟼ Guillermo Gómez-Peña
MX/US 2004, 2’
English

Auntie Beachress – Are You Looking at Me?
⟼ Tonia Jo Hall
US 2015, 1’
English

Overweight with Crooked Teeth
⟼ Shelley Niro
CA/US 1997, 5’
English

Instant Identity Ritual
⟼ Guillermo Gómez-Peña
MX/US 2007, 1’
English

We Grow up to Forget Who We Were
⟼ Inuuteq Storch
GL 2017, 3’
Without dialogue

Sooq Akersuuttugut / Why We Fight
⟼ Melting Barricades
GL/DK 2004, 4’
Greenlandic with English subtitles

Bizarre Thanksgiving Performance Ritual
⟼ Guillermo Gómez-Peña
MX/US 2013, 2’
English

Nuuk Recruitment
⟼ Melting Barricades
GL/DK 2004, 2’
Greenlandic, English with English subtitles

My First Coin
⟼ Julie Edel Hardenberg
GL/DK 2022, 13’
English, Danish with English subtitles

Auntie Beachress – Only Boring People Get Bored
⟼ Tonia Jo Hall
US 2015, 1’
English

Karl-May-Spiele Bad Segeberg Park (trailer)
DE 2025, 3’
German

Dance to Miss Chief
⟼ Kent Monkman
CA 2010, 5’
German, English with English subtitles

Searching for Winnetou (trailer)
DE/CA 2018, 1’
English

Nine ∞
⟼ Krista Belle Stewart
CA/US/DE 2020, 7’
German, English

Native Fantasy
⟼ New York Times
US 2014, 14’
English, German with English subtitles

The Violence of a Civilization without Secrets
⟼ New Red Order
US 2018, 10’
English

Tupilakosaurus
⟼ Pia Arke
DK 1999, 9’
Danish with English subtitles

Copenhagen Invasion (short version)
⟼ Melting Barricades
GL/DK 2004, 4’
Greenlandic, English

• Programm Programme: New Red Order and Co. 5: Anti-Ethnography