Ingawanij’s output challenges the theory and underlying exhibitionary apparatus of slow cinema, and develops a de-westernising curatorial method and concepts for thinking about the radical implication of Diaz’s oeuvre, the expressive and temporal forms of his films, and the historical contexts and legacies shaping his mode of artistic practice. Taken together, the exhibition and the articles demonstrate the necessity of engaging with Diaz’s work from a starting point different from western modernist art cinema’s historically ingrained apparatus of valuing and exhibiting them.
Instead of starting the research process by reproducing the epistemic underpinning of slow cinema, Ingawanij’s curation and textual publications highlight the productiveness of situating Diaz’s oeuvre in relation to contexts and genealogies of socially engaged artistic and performative practices in the Philippines and Southeast Asia. Importantly, her output analyses the relationship between Diaz’s long films and mode of artistic practice, and the legacy of anti-colonial vanguardist artistic and cultural praxis within which the artist is entangled. In particular, the article ‘Long walk to life’ displaces the existing terms of analysis of Diaz’s oeuvre by showing how his long films return to the previous century’s vanguardist conception of the cultural work of Filipino anti-colonial nationalism and third-world liberation movements, while simultaneously projecting the continuity of the time before colonisation, particularly through the figuring of the animist, the spectre and the matriarch.
In international contexts of exhibiting Diaz’s long films, Lav Diaz: Journeys proposes a curatorial method that itself rethinks the exhibition history of the artist’s works. The exhibition does so through calibrating pre-existing conventions and models for presenting his films and demonstrating the potential of designing their exhibition mode in ways attentive to regional and national genealogies of projecting and circulating moving images. As the article ‘Exhibiting Lav Diaz’s long films’ discusses, rather than assuming that the correct way to exhibit the artist’s films would be one that would somehow mandate spectatorial endurance and invite a so-called contemplative mode of spectatorship, Ingawanij’s curation thinks through how Diaz’s long films create multiple frictions with existing westernised conventions and sites of art film and artists’ moving image exhibition and spectatorship, and how they imply potentiality associated with other performative genealogies and possibilities of cultural-political values.
Ingawanij’s output thus proposes the following ideas for grasping the values and potentiality of Diaz’s very long films. They are: ambiguities of anti-colonial nationalist legacies in contemporary artistic and cultural praxis in the Philippines and comparable global south contexts; the sociality of durational forms and spectatorial labour routed through specific regional and/or national genealogies; the porosity of film curation and participatory spectatorship; and the implication of Diaz’s oeuvre for de-westernising modes of film programming and curation. These ideas replace slowness, contemplation and cinephiliac endurance as terms with which to describe the value and the political implication of the expenditure of time and effort in studying, curating and experiencing the artist’s long films.
Further indications of the research contributions of Ingawanij’s work on Diaz include: the international symposium organised as part of the exhibition highlighted new and under-explored approaches for analysing Diaz’s films, including film ecocriticism, and art historical readings of the relationship between the iconographic aspects of Diaz’s films and modern and contemporary Philippine art history. Ingawanij’s ‘Long walk to life’ article was requested for re-publication in a forthcoming book on the artist, edited by Parichay Patra and Michael Kho Lim (Intellect Books). Ingawanij’s publication and curatorial work comprising this output also led to two invitations to contribute article-length studies of the artist’s work, published beyond this REF period. New Left Review journal will publish Ingawanij’s analysis of Diaz’s films made in response to the disastrous nationalist turn in the Philippines under the presidency of Rodrigo Duterte. The forthcoming bilingual book (French-English), Lav Diaz: faire face/Lav Diaz: To Face Up, edited by Oliver Zuchat, Corinne Maury, Marcos Uzal (Editions Macula), features Ingawanij’s study of the temporally recursive, historiographic and animistic characteristics of Diaz’s A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery and From What Is Before. Ingawanij has also been invited to deliver multiple keynotes and lectures on Diaz’s works.
| Creators | Ingawanij, M.A. |
|---|---|
| Description | Lav Diaz: Journeys (2017) deploys the university arts spaces (London Gallery West, Regent Street Cinema), as differentiated from film festival or highly commercial film venues, to adapt the migratory model of exhibiting radical films and artists’ moving image. Ingawanij and collaborators created a hybrid space, a pop-up cinema and Southeast Asian curatorial space, to present Diaz’s works, accompanied by public programmes and an archival theatrical presentation. Underpinning the curatorial method is an understanding of histories and practices of artistic and participatory agency in contexts of fragile and at-risk arts infrastructure, and attentiveness to the legacy of artistic and cultural vanguardism in the Philippines. Ingawanij’s curation also draws inspiration from Southeast Asian genealogies of performative practices, informality as curatorial praxis, and spectatorial participation and experience. Her first article explores the aesthetic and political forms of Diaz’s long films. The second analyses the vexed exhibition history of Diaz’s long films, critically highlighting the tensions shaped by the persistence of the western modernist paradigm of art film spectatorship in advocating the value of global contemporary art or radical films, especially through the idea of “slow cinema”. The project generated multiple insights into the values and potentiality of Diaz’s films: ambiguities of anticolonial nationalist legacies in contemporary artistic praxis; sociality of durational forms and spectatorial labour routed through specific regional and/or national genealogies; porosity of film curation and participatory spectatorship. |
| Portfolio items | Lav Diaz: Journeys |
| Exhibiting Lav Diaz's Long Films: Currencies of Circulation and Dialectics of Spectatorship | |
| Long Walk to Life: the Films of Lav Diaz | |
| Year | 2017 |
| Publisher | University of Westminster |
| Web address (URL) | https://www.westminster.ac.uk/news-and-events/events/lav-diaz-journeys |
| Keywords | Lav Diaz, curation, spectatorship, world cinema |
| CREAM Portfolio | |
| Funder | Strategic Research Fund, University of Westminster |
| Digital Object Identifier (DOI) | https://doi.org/10.34737/qvw88 |