Animistic Medium: Contemporary Southeast Asian Artists Moving Image Practices

A film screening programme and talk

Please join us for a screening programme of short moving image works made by Southeast Asian contemporary artists with an introduction by CSEAS Visiting Scholar Dr May Adadol Ingawanij (Professor of Cinematic Arts, University of Westminster). The screening programme is based on Dr Ingawanij’s research project, Animistic Medium, which explores the aesthetics and circulation of film and media arts practices by Southeast Asian artists, and conceptualises the relationship between contemporary artistic practice, the political, the regional, and agency.

Date & Time: 2022.7.28 (THU)  17:30-19:00
Venue: 1st Floor, Former Kyoto Prize Library Room Inamori Bldg

Professor May Adadol Ingawanij
CSEAS visiting fellow

Moderator:  LOPEZ, Mario Ivan

Contact: Satoru Kobayashi (kobasa[at]cseas.kyoto-u.ac.jp)

Abstract: PDF
For this screening event and talk, we will watch a selection of short moving image works by artists Tanatchai Bandasak (Recording of a Screening for a Spirit, 2015, 3 minutes, Thailand), Riar Rizaldi (Kasiterit, 2019, 18 minutes, Indonesia), Tuan Andrew Nguyen (The Boat People, 2020, 20 minutes, Vietnam), and Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Fireworks (Archives), 2014, 6 minutes, Thailand). Dr Ingawanij will introduce each artistic work while weaving in stories, insights and questions drawn from her research process. Her starting point is to observe a pattern whereby Southeast Asian contemporary artists are making moving image works that evoke animistic rituals, and that figure animistic beings, while engaging with historical and political legacies. A striking tendency among Southeast Asian artists moving image works is that their formal, sensorial, relational and enunciative features resonate with practices of communication, emplacement, and temporal orientation characteristic of what anthropologist Kaj Århem has recently theorised as Southeast Asian animism. How to make sense of this?

Bio-Note:
Prof. May Adadol Ingawanij (CSEAS visiting fellow)
May Adadol Ingawanij is Professor of Cinematic Arts at University of Westminster, UK. As a writer, theorist and curator she specialises in Southeast Asian artists moving image practices, contemporary art, and cinema. Her research and pedagogy intersect contemporary artistic and curatorial practice, film studies, art history, and area studies. Key themes include: de-centred histories and genealogies of cinematic arts in Southeast Asia; legacies of regional artistic and political vanguardism; forms of potentiality and future-making in contemporary artistic and curatorial practices; aesthetics and circulation of artists’ moving image, art and independent films in and related to Southeast Asia.