This month, Marrugeku’s Gudirr Gudirr showed at Red Earth Arts Festival (REAF) in Karratha, Western Australia, a beacon of artistic and cultural activity in the Pilbarra region. Gudirr Gudirr screened at the Cossack Bond Store, as part of the four day festival, which “transforms ordinary spaces into captivating canvases, infusing them with the vibrancy of art in all its forms” (REAF, 2026).
Gudirr Gudirr is a multi-channel video and sound installation choreographed by Dalisa Pigram and directed by Vernon Ah Kee, originally premiering in 2020. It was filmed on location in Rubibi (Broome), W.A. and re-imagines the original solo dance performance by Dalisa Pigram, conceived together with Patrick Dodson.
Gudirr Gudirr (the guwayi bird) calls when the tide is turning — to miss the call is to drown. By turns hesitant, restless, resilient and angry, Gudirr Gudirr lights a path from a broken past through a fragile present and towards an uncertain future.
Considering the legacy of Australia’s history for Aboriginal people in northwest Australia today Gudirr Gudirr asks: what does it take to decolonise Aboriginal peoples’ minds, to unlock doors and to face cultural change? The installation calls a warning to a community facing massive industrialisation on traditional lands, loss of language and major gaps between Indigenous and non-Indigenous wellbeing. Expressing a physicality borne of their shared Asian–Indigenous identity, Ah Kee and Pigram capture the warning call of the wader bird in an intimate gestural language of dance and portraiture and text based imagery.
Watch a trailer of Gudirr Gudirr here.
Image by Philip Thompson @boyfrombeyond Photography
