Exhibiting Lav Diaz's Long Films: Currencies of Circulation and Dialectics of Spectatorship

This article forms part of a larger project to explore the contemporaneity of the long films and mode of artistic practice of Filipino independent filmmaker Lav Diaz. Its research method encompasses the practice of curation combined with an exploration of the trajectories of circulation and exhibition of Diaz’s films. Drawing on my recent experience of co-curating the exhibition Lav Diaz: Journeys (January-March 2017), the article discusses the practical, institutional, conceptual, and discursive challenges of exhibiting Diaz’s long films. The process of exhibition making, and some responses to the strengths and limitations of the exhibition’s form, opened up productive hesitancies over the question of how one is to exhibit Diaz’s long films in the way that they are ‘meant to be shown.’ The frictions encountered in the curatorial process and during the exhibition’s life would seem to signal the way that Diaz’s films invoke disparate, and at times contending, conceptions of cinematic experience, participation, and spectatorial ethics

Itinerant Cinematic Practices In and Around Thailand During the Cold War

This article returns to an untimely cinematic practice. Watching feature-length narrative films in rural and urban Thailand, and around the northeastern and southern borderlands, during the mid-twentieth century did not necessarily mean going to cinema theatres. The predominant modality of cinematic encounter and experience would have been via itinerant makeshift cinema. Mobile film troupes criss-crossed the country, and wandered into territories beyond that of the nation-state, with their assemblage of voice performers, 16mm reels and projector, speakers, electricity generator, and an array of other technical tools and locomotives. A variety of events above and beyond commercial ones aiming to sell tickets occasioned the arrival of the projection performance troupes. There were shows to promote goods, to give offerings and thanks to the spirits, and also to propagate anti-communist messages and feelings. What kind of a cinematic apparatus is itinerant makeshift cinema? My article proposes to understand itinerant makeshift cinema as a cinematic apparatus, or more precisely, a dispositive whose ontological basis for manifesting moving images and occasioning bodily experiences of images are grounded in itinerancy of display, intensified durational dilation and indeterminacy, and a logic of transmission that associates presence and transformation with the exchanging and channelling of forces between the human and non-human

Animistic Apparatus screening programme at Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions

“For these screening programmes especially curated for the Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions, we are delighted to present recent films by leading moving image artists who have graced the Animistic Apparatus project with their presence. Some have participated in an artistic research trip we organised in northeast Thailand, others have presented outstanding works as part of the project’s itinerant exhibitions, and all of them are shaping our thinking about the potential of artists’ moving image practices as cosmological medium of communicating, relating and knowing.” May Adadol Ingawanij and Julian Ross Animistic Apparatus screening programmes co-curated by May and Julian as Guest Programmers. Screenings accompanied by Guest Programmers’ talk with Tokyo Photographic Art Museum curator Hiroko Tasaka. Yebisu international Festival for Art & Alternative Visions, Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Feb 2022. Programme 1 Pathompon Mont TESPRATEEP, LULLABY, 2019 / 8min Riar RIZALDI, Tellurian Drama, 2020 / 26 min Juanita ONZAGA, The Jungle Knows You Better than You Do, 2017 / 20 min. Shambhavi KAUL, Mount Song, 2013 / 8 min TRUONG Minh Quý + Freddy Nadolny POUSTOCHKINE, Mars in the Well, 2014 / 19 min Programme 2 Anocha SUWICHAKORNPONG, By The Time It Gets Dark (Dao Khanong), 2016 / 105 min Programme 3 Anocha SUWICHAKORNPONG, Mundane History (Jao Nok Krajok), 2009 / 82 min, *35mm film Post screening tal

Forces and Volumes

An almost wordless screening programme featuring studies of land and sea by Southeast Asian artists Nguyen Trinh Thi, Charles Lim, Khvay Samnang and Nget Rady, and Taiki Sakpisit. These works invite us to reflect on the ways in which physical and sovereign forces shape and reshape space, and take lives or reverse fortunes. They channel undead forces. These potent videos utilise the tactile, gestural and durational capacities of video to embody subterraneous currents charged with anteriority and danger. Landscape Series #1 Nguyen Trinh Thi Vietnam/2013/5’/color/HD “I am interested in the idea of landscapes as quiet witnesses to history. During my online search for such photos, I came upon hundreds of images in which anonymous persons were portrayed in landscapes – and always in the same position, pointing to indicate a past event, the location of something gone, something lost or missing...” (Nguyen Trinh Thi) All the Lines Flow Out Charles Lim Singapore/2011/21’20”/color/DCP “When you look at Singapore as an island, you think of the island as a territory, but I was thinking of the idea that the island is actually not the territory, [but] the static space where things don’t happen. Everything that happens is in the water, there’s a lot more changes there...” (Charles Lim) Where is My Land? Khvay Samnang with Nget Rady Cambodia/2014/13’ 30”/color/HD A collaboration between contemporary artist Khvay Samnang and dancer Nget Rady in response to the fatally changing face of the land in Cambodia. "Several hundred homes have fallen into Cambodia’s rivers in recent years, and several deaths have been reported. Villagers blame the extreme erosion on sand-dredging barges and pipelines, the sound of which torments them day and night. With few options for compensation and little if any access to the luxury developments for which the sand is being mined, many are left wondering: Where Is My Land?" (Roger Nelson) A Ripe Volcano Taiki Sakpisit, Thailand/2011/15;15"/color/HD The artist cuts footage from the faded Rattanakosin Hotel, an emblematic site of political haunting in Bangkok, with images of mass rituals and other temporally charges spaces of Thailand’s capital city. The result is an abstract, sensorially intense evocation of the recent political uprising and massacres. “Featuring scenes of incredibly potent and withheld power...the awesome work is a penetrating signature of a nation on the verge of massive change but little security as to how the country will develop.” (George Clark) First shown at BIMI Essay Film Festival (2015), touring destinations to Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Seoul 2015), and Bophana Audio-Visual Resource Centre (Phnom Penh 2017)