‘Long walk to life: the films of Lav Diaz’, Afterall Journal, autumn/winter 2015, pp 102–115
Video of post-screening conversation with Diaz at Regent Street Cinema
| 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 |