TERROR NULLIUS

Australia and United States, 2018

Soda Jerk

Single-channel video, 53:47 mins.

ACMI Collection

Artwork ACMI commissions

Hitch a ride into the dark heart of Australia with this blistering, badly behaved sample-based film that confronts the horrors of our national mythologies.

Part political satire, eco-horror and road movie, TERROR NULLIUS is a political revenge fable that binds together a documentary impulse with speculative muckraking. The apocalyptic desert camps of Mad Max 2 become the site of refugee detention, bicentenary celebrations are ravaged by flesh-eating sheep, and the women of Australian cinema go vigilante on Mel Gibson.

By intricately remixing fragments of the nation’s cinema canon, Soda Jerk interrogates the unstable entanglement of fiction that underpins this country’s vexed sense of self.

A weird, dazzling, kinetic, dizzyingly ambitious, sensationally mishmashed beast of an Australian film.” – Luke Buckmaster, The Guardian

Artist bio

Formed in Sydney in 2002, Soda_Jerk is a two-person art collective that approaches sampling as an alternate form of history-making.

Working at the intersection of documentary and speculative fiction, their archival practice has taken the form of video installations, cut-up texts, screensavers and live video essays.

Soda_Jerk has recently collaborated with Australian collectives The Avalanches and VNS Matrix, and have held solo exhibitions at Anthology Film Archives in New York, the National Museum for Women in the Arts in Washington DC, and Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin.

Their multi-channel video installations have also been staged at Pioneer Works, New York; Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff; Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane.

During 2017 their work has shown at SPACES, Cleveland; Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh and the Barbican, London.

Following their acclaimed political revenge fable TERROR NULLIUS (2018), Soda_Jerk are currently working on a new feature Hello Dankness.

The trailer for Soda_Jerk's TERROR NULLIUS

How are these works connected?

Explore this constellation

Related articles

Related works

Related events

Content notification

Our collection comprises over 40,000 moving image works, acquired and catalogued between the 1940s and early 2000s. As a result, some items may reflect outdated, offensive and possibly harmful views and opinions. ACMI is working to identify and redress such usages.

Learn more about our collection and our collection policy here. If you come across harmful content on our website that you would like to report, let us know.

Collection

In ACMI's collection

Credits

creator

Soda Jerk

Duration

00:53:47:00

Production dates
2018

Collection metadata

ACMI Identifier

Z000123

Subject category

Digital Art

Object Types

Artwork

Materials

Single channel video, projection, colour and audio

Collected

464 times

Please note: this archive is an ongoing body of work. Sometimes the credit information (director, year etc) isn’t available so these fields may be left blank; we are progressively filling these in with further research.

Cite this work on Wikipedia

If you would like to cite this item, please use the following template: {{cite web |url=https://acmi.net.au/works/117894--terror-nullius/ |title=TERROR NULLIUS |author=Australian Centre for the Moving Image |access-date=29 November 2024 |publisher=Australian Centre for the Moving Image}}