Project framework: context, research questions, summary of research insights

Animistic Apparatus is a curatorial and publication project conceptualising the regional, cinematic, enunciative and relational characteristics of Southeast Asian artists’ moving image. Ingawanij conceived the research project as a process for developing a curatorial method for studying artists’ moving image practices within a de-westernised framework attentive to regional genealogies of medial, communicational, ecological and ritual forms. Intersecting the disciplines of film theory, art history, anthropology and curation, the components of this output together enact a speculative inquiry leading to the proposition of the concept of an animistic medium characterising Southeast Asian artists’ moving image.

The project places contemporary moving image works, such as those of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Lav Diaz, Lucy Davis, Nguyen Trinh Thi, Chris Chong Chan Fui and Korakrit Arunanondchai, in a provisional constellation with the region’s itinerant film projection rituals performed as an offering addressed to powerful spirits of local territories. This is an experimental method for gathering and juxtaposing past and present cinematic practices, and for proposing a speculative conceptualisation of the regionality and aesthetics of Southeast Asian artists’ moving image. The project develops a method of inquiry entwining moving image works with the region’s scattered genealogies of animism defined as improvisatory rituals and apparatuses of human-spirit sociality and communication.

The components of this output are: Ingawanij and her collaborators’ curation of a site-based Southeast Asian artists’ moving image exhibition at BFMAF; an article written by Ingawanij in the mode of creative non-fiction based on the team’s curation of the field learning, artistic research and performance rehearsal event in Udon Thani, involving 40 artists, curators, anthropologists and researchers largely based in Southeast Asia, and an itinerant film projection troupe; eight itinerant film screening programmes exploring thematics and aesthetics of animism in Southeast Asian artists’ moving image. 

Context  

Animistic Apparatus builds on Ingawanij’s long-term research on decentred histories and genealogies of cinema and moving image practices, motivated by the agenda to de-westernise concepts and methods of study. As evidenced in previous submissions (REF 2014, RAE 2008), in the past 15 years Ingawanij has played a key role in advancing the research field of Southeast Asian cinema. Her publications and curatorial projects propose the categories of Southeast Asian independent cinema and artists’ moving image, analysing their formation and defining their body of works. Her historical research into micro, local and regional cinematic practices challenges established notions of cinema’s ontology and cinematic modernity.

Animistic Apparatus dialogues with three areas of debate across disciplines of film theory, art history, global contemporary art and area studies. 

1 Within contemporary art and cinema, the present moment is one of the legitimisation of the values of global inclusion and the decentring of trajectories of practice. Yet the dominant vocabularies for engaging with artistic practice tend to remain restricted to ones deriving from Christian and Greek philosophies and from western institutional art history and genealogy of modernity. Animistic Apparatus experiments with producing methods and vocabularies for exhibiting and thinking with artists’ moving image, doing so through speculative processes constellating contemporary artistic practices with scattered genealogies of animism across Southeast Asia.

The project’s mobilisation of concepts and practices of animism draws on recent key works in anthropology of the more-than-human in Southeast Asia, which dialogue with current theoretical and philosophical discourses sometimes called “new animism” (Arhem and Sprenger, 2016; Herrmans, 2011). Ingawanij engages with anthropological research on Southeast Asian animism in order to critically distance from existing tropes of animism in film theorising and curatorial practice. In the early history of western film theorising, animism functioned as a key metaphor in poetic-theoretical discourse concerning silent cinema’s medium specific property. Contemporary film theoretical discourses concerning the animistic properties of cinema focus on issues of post-human consciousness, cinematic conceptions of life in the post-internet age, or on exploring cinema’s complex entanglement with western primitivist enchantment through encountering the other (Keller and Paul, 2012; Moore, 2000; Morin, 2005).

Animism has also become a familiar theme of contemporary art discourse and curation. An influential curatorial and theoretical paradigm comes from the travelling exhibition Animism (curated by Franke, 2010 – ), which conceives animism in terms of epistemic violence and aesthetics of projection – a boundary-making practice denying relationality between the West and its counterparts. These examples tend to sidestep the question of human agency in their prioritisation of mechanical intelligence and machine consciousness, or they overemphasise the notion of the common soulfulness of beings and objects. The thematisation of animism also tends to imply an overriding concern with the agency and subjectivity of certain predominant figures of modernity, mainly the western coloniser.

2 Animistic Apparatus’ development of its method of speculative regionalisation is in critical dialogue with institutional discourses of Southeast Asian contemporary art. The exhibition Sunshower: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia 1980s to Now (The National Art Center and Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2017, touring), ruangrupa’s curatorial appointment to Documenta 15, in 2022, and the current Southeast Asia focus of MoMA’s Contemporary and modern art perspectives (C-MAP) cross-departmental, internal research programme, are some indications that Southeast Asian modern and contemporary art is commanding considerable interest across international museums and cultural institutions.

An essential task at this moment is to build a strong research base, especially the kind that combines historical and aesthetic study with theoretical and methodological reflexivity. Ingawanij’s project aligns itself with recent scholarship that proposes reflexive approaches to historicising and conceptualising regionality of artistic practice (Teh, 2018). Art historical works such as the editorial direction of the journal Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, or the special issues on Southeast Asian contemporary art in the journals World Art (2020) and Third Text (2011), note the need to move away from approaches to classifying Southeast Asian art through traditional area studies vocabularies and concerns, for instance, framing the region as a fictional creation of the Cold War and valorising artistic practice through tropes of urban identity or modernisation; or exhibiting Southeast Asian works through civilisational tropes implying the region to be a minor area within East or South Asia.

Large-scale, regionalising inter-museum survey exhibitions (Sunshower; Phantoms of Asia: Contemporary Awakens the Past, 2012) tend to contextualise artists’ mobilisation of motifs connected to animism in terms of the co-existence of the traditional and the modern, doing so to ground their curatorial proposition concerning Southeast Asian art’s exemplification of Asian modernism. Or they tend to discursively gloss artistic mobilisation of animism as demonstrating regional contemporary art’s fascination with spiritualism, or affirming art’s power of spiritual redemption and psychic enchantment in the modern world.

3 Animistic Apparatus develops a de-westernised approach for exploring the foundational question of what cinema is, what constitutes cinematic apparatus, and how to characterise its intermediality and its heterogeneity. The question of cinema’s ontology, and its contemporary proliferation, is most often posed in relation to new screen technologies (Mondloch, 2010), the migration of cinema to museums and art institutions (Balsom, 2013), and digital distribution markets and network infrastructures (Crisp, 2015) – approaches which draw predominantly on western contexts of practice. Alongside its creative extension of works on Southeast Asian art history and anthropology, Ingawanij’s project engages with cinema and media archaeology (Elsaesser, 2016; Harbord, 2016), especially from recent works that use lobal south contexts as theoretical grounds (Larkin, 2008; Meyer, 2015; Bao, 2015); and theories of contemporary art and the curatorial attentive to the relationship between works, activities and sites (Smith, 2012).  

Key questions   

As such, Animistic Apparatus’s key aims are:

1 To define Southeast Asian artists’ moving image through the development of a speculative method leading to the creation of precisely articulated poetics and concepts.

2 To demonstrate and advocate experimental approaches to researching Southeast Asian cinema and artists’ moving image, especially ones that incorporate curatorial and interdisciplinary methods and framing.

3 To explore questions of cinema’s ontology, apparatus and heterogeneity through historical and contemporary examples of practices that are not widely known, and in the process develop de-westernised and regionalising methods and vocabularies for such inquiries.  

Summary of research insights   

Animistic Apparatus is a curatorial and publication project conceptualising the regional, cinematic, contemporary, enunciative and relational characteristics of Southeast Asian artists’ moving image. The components of this output together propose a definition of Southeast Asian artists’ moving image as an animistic medium of enworlding and expression, and as a temporally heterogenous aesthetics whose mode of enunciation implies an ecological conception of human sociality with, and precarious relations to, powerful historical and cosmological forces in more-than-human worlds.