Redoubt Film Screening

1.30–1.45pm – Pre-screening floor talk in Gallery 16.

2–4.30pm – Introduction by Matthew Barney & film screening in the James Fairfax Theatre.

Free, booking essential.

Rating:  Unclassified.

Viewer advice: This film contains depictions of animal slaughter and wound detail. Viewer discretion is advised. Children under 15 must be accompanied by a parent or guardian.

Join us for the Australian premier screening of Redoubt, the latest film from renowned American artist and filmmaker, Matthew Barney, and a new addition to the National Gallery’s collection.

Visually stunning and ambitious, Redoubt unfolds as a series of hunts in the wilderness of Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains. The characters communicate a mythological narrative through dance, letting movement replace language as they pursue each other and their prey.

By layering classical, cosmological, and American myths about humanity’s place in the natural world, Redoubt forms a complex portrait of the central Idaho region.

Redoubt, premiered at the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, and then travelled to UCCA, Beijing, in September 2019, and the Hayward Gallery, London in 2020.

This event is the only planned screening of the film in Australia and will include an exclusive introduction from the artist joining online from New York.

Matthew Barney’s Redoubt project encompasses the film and a series of sculptural works, including Basin Creek burn on display in Gallery 16 at the National Gallery. To create this monumental sculpture, molten copper and brass were poured through a skeletal tree harvested from a burned forest in the Sawtooth Mountains, creating a unique cast of the core and the exterior as the metal flowed and cooled. Basin Creek burn stands as a physical embodiment of Barney’s feature length film and continues his longstanding preoccupation with landscape as both a setting and subject.

Audiences are encouraged to join Lucina Ward, Curator, International Art, for a brief pre-screening floor talk at 1.30pm in Gallery 16.

Matthew Barney was born in San Francisco in 1967 and lives and works in New York. His five-part CREMASTER Cycle (1994-2003) has been called “one of the most imaginative and brilliant achievements in the history of avant-garde cinema.”

Redoubt was a gift to the National Gallery by the artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London.

Basin Creek burn was purchased in 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia's 40th anniversary.