Project narrative

The experience of co-curating the counter-retrospective of Diaz’s films in Thailand led Ingawanij to undertake further research on historical and contemporary models of non-theatrical film and moving image exhibition in Asia. A British Academy International Partnership and Mobility Grant enabled her to collaborate with Shai Heredia, founder and curator of the artists’ moving image and experimental film festival Experimenta India, and Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology. In 2014, Ingawanij and Heredia organised a gathering and a public event in Bangalore, screening moving images accompanied by presentations and conversations exploring aesthetics and infrastructural contexts of creating and exhibiting experimental films and artists’ moving image works in Asia, historically and in the present. They invited about 20 artists, curators and educators, largely based in Asia, who had initiated grassroots, artists-run, informal, experimental or artists’ moving image initiatives to present screening programmes, and to spend time with each other exchanging experiences, insights, dreams and ideas about sustaining the ground for making and experiencing artists’ moving image in their locality, along with prospects for activating translocal curatorial collaborations and ties. This research had a formative impact on Ingawanij’s subsequent experimentations with curating Diaz’s films.

Meantime, on the basis of her research and early advocacy of Diaz’s practice, Ingawanij was invited to write an article for Afterall Journal on his work. ‘Long walk to life’, the first article component of this output, is one of the first English-language publications on Diaz’s body of work for a modern and contemporary art context. Ingawanij used this opportunity to pivot the analysis of his films away from slow cinema and digital cinema, and instead to situate the expressive, enunciative and temporal forms of his films in relation to legacies of anti-colonial nationalism and postcolonial realities in contemporary Philippines.

The year after the publication of the article, Ingawanij won the University of Westminster Strategic Research Fund award to organise the first extensive exhibition of Diaz’s long films in the UK. In 2012, AV Festival had programmed a mini-festival weekend of “slow cinema”, screening a few of Diaz’s films alongside those of artist Ben Rivers. By 2017, when Diaz was now garnering major prizes from A-list film festivals such as Venice or Berlin, no major UK cinema or art institution had yet taken the initiative to organise a large-scale exhibition of his films, unlike elsewhere in Europe, Asia and North America. This was the context motivating the decision of Ingawanij and collaborators to experiment with exhibiting six of Diaz’s long films, utilising the institutional context of university arts spaces to adapt the migratory mode of exhibiting and experiencing artists’ moving image, and to fine-tune existing models for presenting the artist’s works.

The exhibition Lav Diaz: Journeys comprised a gallery installation of a programme of six long films by the artist, each title presented on a weekly rotating basis. These were: From What Is Before (2014, 338 mins); Heremias (Book One: The Legend of the Lizard Princess) (2006, 510 mins); Death in the Land of Encantos (2007, 540 mins); Batang West Side (2001, 300 mins); A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery (2016, 485 mins); The Woman Who Left (2016, 226 mins). Juxtaposed with the gallery exhibition was a film theatrical screening of a 35mm archival print of Batang West Side, and a programme of conversations and an international symposium including artist’s talk and post-screening discussion.

The curatorial team scheduled the exhibition to coincide with the film streaming platform MUBI’s own experiment with presenting a one-year online retrospective of Diaz’s films, rotating on a monthly basis. Within its physical locality of London, Lav Diaz: Journeys would then offer a constellation of different ways to exhibit and experience Diaz’s long films. With the gallery presentation, the long rectangular space of London Gallery West was transformed into a hybrid of pop-up cinema and Southeast Asian curatorial space characterised by informality and porosity of durational and spatial ambience.

The curatorial team created a partial black box, installing a screen measuring 5 x 3 metres and a professional-standard digital projection system. They adapted the floor carpeting and light fittings to heighten appreciation of the compositional rigour and tactility of the black and white images in Diaz’s films. Comfortable floor seating with large bean bags, a few rows of sofas for upright seating and plenty of room to wander about provided options for viewers spending time within the space. In terms of ambience and sound, this partial black box was not designed to be sealed off from the energy and flow of the large campus foyer adjacent to the gallery.

Each day, one of Diaz’s films would be projected from beginning to end, at the announced start time. People could enter and exit the projection space at any time through the gallery door that was kept ajar, permitting two-way sound leakage. This mode of presentation was designed to be in keeping with Diaz’s provocation that his films should ideally be projected without breaks. Their projection should intertwine with the temporal flow of daily life, but, says the artist, this doesn’t mean that viewers of his films must stay in the space of viewing from start to finish.

The London Gallery West presentation was differentiated from the institutionalised theatrical presentation of Diaz’s long films, which tend to schedule blocks of running time with an intermission. Ingawanij’s idea to experiment with a different approach was partly inspired by her attendance of the competition premiere of A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery at Berlin Film Festival. On this occasion, the apparatus for maintaining the exclusivity and prestige of the event included projecting the film with a one-hour lunch break, prohibiting late entry and prohibiting the consumption of food and beverages in the auditorium. Ingawanij felt that the implementation of this historical-disciplinary apparatus of art cinema attendance (see Wasson, 2005) sat very awkwardly with the spirit of Diaz’s film and the genealogy of durational performativity and spectatorial participation that they come out of. At the same time, in terms of technical affordance the London Gallery West presentation would move away from projecting Diaz’s films as “poor image” (Steyerl, 2012). Of necessity, this has tended to be the mode of their presentation in very low-budget, informal and grassroots curatorial contexts.

To supplement the research-led curatorial approach, during the exhibition period the room adjacent to the gallery was transformed into a study and conversation room, which displayed some research material from Diaz’s works, recommended reading and two monitors showing The Day Before the End (2016), a short film by Diaz, and photographic stills evoking Diaz’s working process on his modest film sets. During the exhibition, this conversation space hosted the artist’s talk and discussions between academics, curators and fellow artists, programmed by Ingawanij to bring new insights on Diaz’s works (see Further Dissemination).

The theatrical screening of Batang West Side at Regent Street Cinema, curated in partnership with MUBI and the Austrian Film Archive, presented another model for showing Diaz’s work. While seemingly conforming to a routine mode of film exhibition, this theatrical presentation of Diaz’s first long film quietly displaced the existing assumption about his distinctiveness as an artist. Batang West Side was projected in 35mm, drawing attention to the Austrian Film Archive’s restoration of this colour film (completed in 2013), and signalling the relevance of an earlier phase of Diaz’s practice prior to acquiring the reputation that he now has as the black and white, digital, slow cinema auteur. This UK premiere, followed by a discussion with Diaz, remained a rare occasion of the theatrical exhibition of the film. It was not until the mid-2010s that Diaz’s first completed long film could be publicly shown, because of a protracted rights dispute.

The conceptualisation and process of curating Lav Diaz: Journeys provided primary research material for Ingawanij’s ‘Exhibiting Lav Diaz’s long films: Currencies of circulation and dialectics of spectatorship’, the second article component of the output. This article challenges the theoretical framing of Diaz’s work as exemplary of slow cinema, specifically in relation to questions of spectatorship and exhibition. It is also the first piece of published research on the exhibition history of Diaz’s long films, drawing on Ingawanij’s long-standing curatorial research and activities, along with her tracking of experiments with and models of exhibiting Diaz’s works as they have emerged across different global sites and circuits in the past decade or so. The article was invited for publication in a special issue on “long duration” in Aniki: Portuguese Journal of the Moving Image, edited by Tiago de Luca (University of Warwick), with contributions by world-leading film theorists including Lucia Nagib (University of Reading) and Glyn Davis (University of Edinburgh).