Ent’racte

(2023)

11:20-minute single-channel video

Sitting between silent moving-image portraiture and performance, Entr’acte explores the transformation of rage into grief as it moves through the body and permeates the self. Borrowing its title from the French term for an interlude between acts, the work centres on an Indigenous female protagonist who operates as both individual and symbol, reflecting the layered and often disproportionate responsibilities carried by Indigenous women, grounded in enduring matriarchal systems of care while shaped by the ongoing harms of gendered and colonial violence. She emerges as a vessel for a broader collective experience, bearing the inequitable weight imposed on women across their lives. The film balances intimacy with intensity, capturing the tension between contained grief and restrained rage in the suspended moment before outward reaction.

Neither documentary nor fiction, Entr’acte offers a social commentary on the expectations placed on women, foregrounding the tension between internal experience and external constraint. It attends to intergenerational experiences of motherhood, mothering, and being mothered, reflecting how women are conditioned to suppress emotion, project strength, and persevere within structures that control their bodies and agency. In moments of grief or anger, responses are often carefully weighed within these constraints.

By withholding spectacle, Entr’acte resists voyeuristic depictions of feminine rage and instead reclaims space for emotional authenticity. Drawing on reinterpretations of the Medusa myth, the work considers how narratives of female emotion have been historically distorted to frame women as irrational or unstable, reinforcing distance rather than understanding.

Through its central figure, the work affirms anger and grief as fundamental aspects of human experience. Emotional expression is positioned not as excess, but as a site of agency that contests the cultural forces that seek to contain, silence, or invalidate women’s voices.

‘The pain of women turns them into kittens and rabbits and sunsets and sordid red satin goddesses, pales them and bloodies them and starves them, delivers them to death camps and sends locks of their hair to the stars. Men put them on trains and under them. Violence turns them celestial. Age turns them old. We can’t look away. We can’t stop imagining new ways for them to hurt.’ – Leslie Jamison, 2014, ‘The Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain’.

Entr’acte was commissioned by the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art and Creative Victoria for Between Waves, a Yalingwa exhibition series devoted to First Nations contemporary art, curated by Jessica Clark.