10 research outputs found
The Politics and Aesthetics of Non-Representation: Re-Imagining Ethnographic Cinema with Apichatpong Weerasethakul
This article argues that the work of Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul offers conceptual and methodological tools that may contribute to the re-imagination of ethnographic cinema beyond representation. Weerasethakulâs films emerge out of a para-ethnographic engagement with people and places, rely on participatory methods and operate as hosting devices for a multiplicity of subaltern beings and stories. They enact an inventive and often animistic âperformative realismâ (Ingawanij 2013a) which can be understood as political in the sense that it creates new conditions of possibility and room for alter-ontologies. The article conceptualizes this orientation in relation to the production of âassemblages of collective enunciationâ (Deleuze and Guattari 1986) as well as to Eduardo Viveiros de Castroâs (2010) idea of âtaking seriouslyâ the ontology of others, that is, the other worlds that they experience
Blissfully whose? Jungle pleasures, ultra-modernist cinema and the cosmopolitan Thai auteur
âBlissfully Whose? Jungle Pleasure, Ultra-Modernist Cinema and the Cosmopolitan Thai Auteur,â
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Chris Zhongtian Yuan, no door, one window, only light - home is where the music is
This publication documents and contextualises two parallel exhibitions by Chris Zhongtian Yuan No Door, One Window, Only Light at Macalline Center of Art, Beijing and Home Is Where the Music Is at Reading International, Reading, as part of a wider UKâChina collaborative project.
No Door, One Window, Only Light brings together four video works, drawings, and several installations to form a periodic retrospect and survey of recent works and a newly commissioned film. Reading Internationalâs presentation in response is comprised of a series of video, sound and architectural installations responding to the history, architecture and the institutional structure of Brock Keep, a former military barracks built in 1877, which houses the exhibition venue 571 Oxford Road, Open Hand Open Space.
The two exhibitions and related events provide a conversation around Chris Zhongtian Yuanâs architectural and musical approach to engage with the filmic medium. Yuan examines ways in which spaces of exile and absence are politicised. Recomposing vernacular sonic and spatial materials, Yuanâs work investigates narratives and politics simultaneously building and dismantling our everyday spaces. Drawing from a wide range of music genres such as punk, jazz and noise, Yuan uses sound in a way to re-imagine and improvise memory and
resistance. Their works often visit marginalised communities that are subject to neglect or perplexity amid collective histories, rapid growth or grand narratives. These works consist in persistently
representing home and diaspora/exile as conflicting concepts, while making efforts in a space of contradiction and absence to trace various forms of life, feelings and emotions, and weak
signals trapped between technological evolutions.
Yuanâs previous projects Close, Closer (2020-2021), Wuhan Punk (2020) shown at Reading International, and 1815 (2019-20) examine the complex tensions between collective histories and autobiographical intimacy, centre and margins, and between individuals and institution, normalising the in-between spaces
that cross these dichotomies. The newly commissioned threechannel video work, titled No Door, One Window, Only Light (2023), builds on this series of videos by focusing on an artist friend from home who passed away in 2022, to pose questions around home, absence, trauma and sanity.
An interview between Susanne Clausen and Chris Zhongtian Yuan contextualises the exhibition in Reading, Natalia Grabowska reflects on the use and application of sound in the work, May Adadol Ingawanij on generational relations and legacy , Wenny Teo contextualizes the newly commissioned film No Door, One Window, Only Light and Clement Huangâs article reviews the exhibition in Beijing