This curatorial project consists of two screening programmes titled Us and Refracted Journeys, consisting of film essays and documentary/experimental moving images of/from Asia; a roundtable discussion and networking event. The project took place at the Bienal de la images en movimiento (BIM), Buenos Aires, 2016, and was led by Ingawanij in collaboration with Experimenta India and Arkipel Jakarta. Programme 1 Us
11/04/2016 20:00
Teatro Margarita Xirgu Espacio UNTREF | 120' At that moment when the center cannot hold the question of who we are and what anchors us in collective life emerges with particular acuteness. This program features outstanding recent works from artists in Asia, made in the past decade, which respond to the persistence of the desire for collective existence in the face of antagonism and atomization, and signal the need to think and feel collective existence beyond the established logic of community. The practices of the artists Revereza, Widasari, Sen and Arunanondchai are migratory and multi-contextual. Fittingly, their aesthetics range from experimental film, vérité, performative documentary to media art. DROGA!
MIKO REVEREZA
2014
7’ 21’’
Super 8 mm | B&W | Stereo
A Super 8 tourist film about the Los Angeles landscape through the lens of Filipino immigrants, examining cultural identity by documenting the intersections of American pop culture and Filipino traditions. Recently featured as part of Kalampag Tracking Agency, the curatorial initiative navigating the long history of Filipino experimental moving image practices. Yesterday
OTTY WIDASARI
2008
13’ 11’’
HD | Color | Stereo
Part of the short film anthology Indonesia 9808, in which 10 artists and filmmakers take stock of 10 years of life in the Reformasi period after the fall of the dictator Suharto in 1998. Otty plays herself in this video, which stages an impromptu conversation between two women and two men—girlfriends who go way back with each other and husbands who came after. Who were these thirty-somethings a decade ago? Why were they with the student activists in the thick of the insurrectionary crowd? And were they really part of those epoch-defining events? Laughingly, this provocative yet tender video asks where real life is lived and what binds us to each other. Noon Day Dispensary
PRIYA SEN
2014
27’
HD | Color | Stereo
Filmed at the government-run free dispensary at Savda-Ghevra Resettlement Colony in Delhi, as part of a fellowship exploring urban resettlement, this video was amongst several others that were produced spontaneously, attempting to reclaim the style and philosophies of cinema vérité. Through the “performance’’ of the filmmaker and her frame, it bears witness to a moment in the transition between being illegal occupants of the city, to being legally resettled, and the range of negotiations and subjectivities that accompanies this shift. Painting with History in a Room Filled with People with Funny Names 3
KORAKRIT ARUNANONDCHAI
2015
24’ 55’’
HD | Color | Stereo
A pulsating assemblage that crosses moving image tableaux with camera drone and algorithmic images, mor lam with hip hop, and a dandyish voice-over addressing either a spirit or an invisible spectator known only as Chatri. The voice uttering 21st-century stream of consciousness could be that of the artist-persona or it could be that of the drone. Infusing post-human technology with animistic spirit, the mythical naga snake with Angry Birds, Korakrit’s protean work embodies connective ether binding beings across spaces and times. While highly contemporary in its infrastructural aesthetics, the work makes visually contiguous an incommensurable range of political and religious affect in present-day Thailand. In this sense it figures the desire for collectivity for an imploding country with beguiling sincerity. Programme 2 Refracted Journeys
11/06/2016 20:00
Teatro Margarita Xirgu Espacio UNTREF | 120' Spanning several decades of Asia’s post-Cold War transformations, the four works in this program share a common impetus. Each of them addresses the return of the storm of progress in the afterlife of colonization. Using different forms—found footage (Hernando, Guieb and Albano), essay films (Nguyen, Ermitaño), and audio-visual assemblage (Badhwar)—the artists in the program cast a close look at the fracturing of the land and the violence wrought on bodies and psyche by capital and post-colonial states. With humor and with care, and always with precise intelligence, they chart their open-ended, at times wayward journeys in the wake of destruction. These works, from the Philippines, Vietnam and India, capture fleeting moments of human connection and portray the fragility of collective solidarity with absurdist panache and affective intensity. Unsentimentally glancing back at the promises of struggles past, they record, rearrange, repeat and transmit images and sounds. They are, in other words, moving image works as time machine, undoing the hollow promise of the forward march of progress and preserving recalcitrant messages from the time before for the hope of future recognition. Óxido
JIMBO ALBANO
1989
6’ 33’’
16 mm | Color | Stereo
One of the most prominent and well-crafted films that emerged from the Christoph Janetzko experimental film workshops in Southeast Asia in the 1980s and 1990s, Kalawang is a satirical piece that uses found footage of war, sex, and pop culture to unpick the cultural and libidinal complex of colonization. Recently featured as part of Kalampag Tracking Agency, the curatorial initiative navigating the long history of Filipino experimental moving image practices. Letters from Panduranga
NGUYEN TRINH THI
2015
35’
HD | Color | Stereo
The initial idea for the film is the Vietnamese government’s plan to build nuclear power plants in an ancient land once known as Panduranga. Yet the longer the artist spends time in the land that bears traces of its old matriarchal culture the more she feels her intended subject matter slipping from her grasp. A poetic essay film whose intimate portrayal of faces and landscape, and whose incisive self-questioning, subtly undermine the figure of the heroic artist while asking how art can continue to be socially engaged. The Retrochronological Transfer of Information
TAD ERMITAÑO
1994
9’ 33’’
16 mm | Color | Stereo
Less a documentary than a marvel, as an irreverent parody of science fiction films. A humorous meditation on time, politics, and point of view in cinema. Hoping to send a message back in time by equipping the camera to shoot through Rizal’s portrait on Philippine money, Ermitaño plays with the boundaries of different points of view: Rizal’s, that of Philippine politics, the camera’s, the filmmaker’s, and ours as well as with the temporal relations between them. Recently featured as part of Kalampag Tracking Agency, the curatorial initiative navigating the long history of Filipino experimental moving image practices. Blood Earth
KUSH BADHWAR
2013
36’
HD | Color | Stereo
Kucheipadar village in Odisha is a bauxite-rich block that since India’s economic liberalization has been the subject of violent conflict between Adivasis and a mining venture. The singing of songs has come to articulate creative forms and political structures that steered the Kashipur resistance movement from subalternity, through solidarity and into dissolution. Blood Earth interweaves the efforts to record song, farming, village life and a political meeting to improvise a junction between voice, music, silence, sound and noise. Roundtable: Southern Collectives and Networks
11/08/2016 13:00
Alianza Francesa de Buenos Aires | 180' An open round table to discuss and explore together—with different groups from Argentina in dialogue with Asian artists and curators—prospects for new partnerships, conversations and possible projects within the South-South axis, an axis that has been timidly explored and encouraged. |