part of The Child Inside Us All, a season of artists’ films selected by Let’s Make Art, in collaboration with Film and Video Umbrella.
In Ted Hughes’ short story The Iron Woman, a background murmur of eerie disquiet emanating from rivers and fields is recognised by children as more than an ordinary everyday phenomenon and, instead, as a collective howl of pain and anguish emitted by the creatures who live there. Roused into action by this distress call to which adults have turned a deaf ear, a group of youngsters converge on a local factory that has been a major source of pollution in the area.
Angered by the complacency and complicity of their elders, the children take matters into their own hands, confronting the workers at the factory with the consequences of their actions, and forcing them to wake up to the significance of this increasingly audible, urgent alarm.
In Mikhail Karikis’ short video, a class of seven-year-olds from an East London school, who have been studying and discussing the story in their lessons, wonder what they might do in similar circumstances.
The children also get a crash course (from Karikis) in the dynamic properties of sound – how it ripples and reverberates through the material universe; and how it can trigger transformative change. A highlight of the video is Karikis’ use of cymatics experiments, in which the vibrations of a particular noise or utterance, when passed through liquid or other viscous or powdered matter, acquire their own unique visual signature.
Activated by sound, each random spill suggests a hubbub of possibility, as mysterious as it is unsettling. Shape-shifting, spongiform and always in flux, the cymatics experiments resemble miniature landscapes. Fissuring like melting ice-floes or thawing permafrost, they feel like omens of the uncertain ecological future that the children will inherit. An augury of the rising tide that may come to engulf them, these images – self-generating, cumulative, viral – also prefigure the wave of collective energy that will be needed to combat the damage we are doing to the planet.
At the end of the film, the children – colourfully masked, accusing, defiant – crowd around the camera. In an echo of the Hughes story, or following the lead of a current social media hashtag that has been gaining rapidly in popularity, they are ready to ‘bring the noise’. No ordinary protest, but a riotous, righteous chorus of diminutive voices demanding to be heard.
Commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art and Whitechapel Gallery. Supported by Arts Council England. 2018, 8 minutes 1 second.
Artist Bio:
Mikhail Karikis is an award winning Greek-British artist living between London and Lisbon, working with moving image, sound, performance and other media, and exhibiting internationally. Through collaborations with individuals and/or communities located beyond the circles of contemporary art, and in recent years with children, refugees, support workers and people with disabilities, he develops socially embedded projects that prompt an activist imaginary and rouse the potential to invent hopeful and sustainable futures. His projects highlight alternative modes of action and solidarity, while nurturing critical attention, dignity and care.
Karikis is recipient of the Paul Hamlyn Award 2024, and was finalist for the Film London Derek Jarman Award 2016 and 2019, as well as the Anglo-Japanese DAIWA Art Prize 2015.
Solo exhibitions in 2025 include the comprehensive mid-career retrospective Voices, Communities, Ecologies, Kunstmuseum St Gallen, CH and Estamos Juntos Porque…, Centre for Modern Art Gulbenkian CAM, Lisbon PT; Songs for the Storm to Come, HOME Gallery, Manchester, UK and survey show Voices, Communities, Ecologies Cukrarna Centre for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana, SO (2024); a mid-career survey exhibition Because We Are Together, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens GR (2023); Ferocious Love, Tate Liverpool (2020); Children of Unquiet, Tate St Ives, UK (2019-20); Mikhail Karikis, MORI Art Museum, Tokyo, JP (2019); No Ordinary Protest, Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK (2018); Ain’t Got No Fear, Turku Art Museum, FI (2018) and elsewhere.
Group exhibitions include 54th Venice Biennale, (2011), IT; Manifesta 9, Ghenk, (2012); 19th Biennale of Sydney, (2014); Kochi-Muziris Biennale, IN, (2016); MediaCity Seoul, KR (2015); British Art Show 8 (2016-7); 2nd Riga International Biennale of Contemporary Art, LV (2020), 2nd Saitama Triennale (2024), JP and others.
In his most recent works for the stage, he created performances for 300 participants in his role as artistic director for UNESCO’s Creative Cities Network inaugural cultural event in Braga PT (2024) and for his project Sons de Uma Revoluçã for Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, PT (2024).
Karikis’s creative endeavours include music performances at Royal Opera House Covent Garden and Barbican Theatre, music albums in collaboration with Björk, DJ Spooky and his three solo albums – Orphica (2007), Morphica (2009), Xenofonia (2012) – on the Belgian record label Sub Rosa.
