A curatorial research project on Southeast Asian contemporary artist cinema and animistic poetics.
Animistic Apparatus places Southeast Asian contemporary artist cinema in constellation with the region’s animistic practices including itinerant film projection rituals performed as spirit offerings.
The project takes multiple forms, including exhibitions, screenings, artistic research field trip, commissioning, talks and publications. Browse this collection for detail of activities, published works and reviews. Animistic Apparatus kin include Julian Ross, Tanatchai Bandasak, Mary Pansanga, Noir Row Art Space and many others. It is indebted to the generosity and gift of creation of many artists, curators, doers and thinkers that feed its endeavours.
The book writing aspect of this project, Animistic Poetics: Southeast Asian Contemporary Artist Cinema, asks: How do residues of vanguardism shape global contemporary art? How is Southeast Asian contemporary art entangled with the aspiration, residue and afterlife of mid-twentieth century revolutions and revolts? What is Southeast Asian contemporary artist cinema? What are the possibilities of writing about, and in relation to, contemporary artistic practices from the place of curatorial intimacy?
Interrelating conjunctural art history with experimental curatorial writing, I theorise the intertwining of residual vanguardism, hegemonic institutions and infrastructures of contemporary art production and circulation, and artists’ cinematic-poetic forms of historical inquiry. I define Southeast Asian contemporary artist cinema as animistic poetics produced within the contradictions and asymmetries of artistic and curatorial enmeshment in global contemporary art. The artists addressed in the book are those with whom I have curatorial relationships: Korakrit Arunanondchai, Lucy Davis/Migrant Ecologies Project, Lav Diaz, Daniel Hui, Ho Tzu Nyen, Riar Rizaldi, Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, Taiki Sakpisit, Sriwhana Spong, Anocha Suwichakornpong, Nguyen Trinh Thi and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Animistic Poetics attends to their imaginative historical research; their creation of cosmological, ritualistic, atmospheric and site responsive forms; their addressing the opaque, the invisible, the unknowable through cinematic intensities, temporalities and rhythms. The book proposes that Southeast Asian contemporary artists make cinematic-poetic forms addressing intergenerational relations, futuristic returns and vulnerability to the unknown.
A central concern of Animistic Poetics is tracing the transfiguration of residual vanguardism into discursive-institutional value accelerating artistic mobility. I analyse the generative contradictions of appropriating local residual vanguardism as art historical heritage. This dynamic is an overlooked yet determinative component of strategies that frame Southeast Asian contemporary art as emblematic of the global contemporary. The legibility of residual vanguardism as art historical heritage within global art circuits enables artists to explore unspeakable and illegible histories in their contexts of political citizenship. The book extends counter-theorisation of vanguardist practices beyond the Euro-America as dialectics of institutional dependency, criticality, precarity and subversion.
Animistic Poetics experiment with creative possibilities in writing art history, and engagement with anthropological research on Southeast Asia and animistic practices. Simultaneously, the book draws on the dynamic yet overlooked field of Southeast Asian curatorial writing shaped by the bond of ongoing curator-artist relationship. Studying anthropological storytelling helps to characterise animistic poetics as affinity with the everyday cosmological and futural practices of powerless humans in opaque worlds governed by unaccountable forces.
