Biographical list of participants of the Animistic Apparatus field research and rehearsal trip in Udon Thani. Click here and here for stories of the trip.
Annie Jael Kwan
Annie is a London-based Singaporean curator, researcher and educator working in visual and live art. Among her recent projects are initiatives to re-think archives (and un-archiving) with respect to artistic practice, which resulted in the exhibition, UnAuthorised Medium (2018) (UA), and the launch of the Southeast Asia Performance Collection (2017) (SAPC). She has developed experimental platforms to investigate ways of communality and solidarity, the most recent Asia-Art-Activism, the network currently in residence as part of the inaugural selection of collectives, at Raven Row till August 2019.
Arnont Nongyao
Arnont (b. 1979 Bangkok) is an artist who lives and works in Chiangmai. He works with various media including sound, video, installation, site specific, and public art. His work engages his interest in vibration, resulting in diverse art experimental projects related to vibration. Arnont is Co-Director of Aesthetic of Error ( Chiang Mai Collective).
Christian Tablazon
Christian Tablazon (b. 1985, Manila) works with video and other photo-based media, installation, and text. He is a recipient of several national fellowships in cultural criticism, and his works have been published and exhibited in 14 countries. He runs Nomina Nuda, a small non-profit independent platform and exhibition space in Los Baños, Laguna dedicated to emerging art practices in the Southern Tagalog region. His research interests include memory and autobiography in moving-image practices, low-resolution imagery, place and space in cinema, transportation and mobility in East and Southeast Asian horror films, and spaces of spectrality and representations of trauma in visual media.
Danaya Chulphuthiphong
Danaya Chulphuthiphong lives and works in Bangkok. She holds a BA in Archaeology and MFA in Visual Arts. She started her career as a documentary photographer for a newspaper and a magazine. She is interested in lens-based arts and works with both still and moving images. Her short film ‘Night Watch’ (2014) was selected for participation in the International Competition of the 61st International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Experimenta India, and others. ‘Demos’ (2016) was selected for participation in Southeast Asian Short Film Competition of the 27th Singapore International Film Festival and won the BACC award from the 20th Thai Short Film and Video Festival.
Daniel Hui
Daniel HUI is a filmmaker and writer. A graduate of the film program in California Institute of the Arts, he is one of the founding members of 13 Little Pictures, a critically acclaimed independent film collective in Singapore. He has made three feature-length films — Eclipses (Pixel Bunker Award for International New Talent, Doclisboa IFF 2013), Snakeskin (Special Jury Award TFFDoc, Torino FF 2014; Award of Excellence, Yamagata IDFF 2015; Special Jury Mention, RIDM 2015), and Demons (In Competition, Kim Jiseok Award, Busan IFF 2018; Berlinale Forum 2019).
Donlawat Sunsuk (Bob)
Bob Donlawat studied journalism at Burapha University. He is currently a freelance journalist and documentary maker based in Nong Bua Lamphu in northeast Thailand. He has published with TCIJ, Thaipublica, Isaan Record, and BBC. His research interests include film propaganda activities during the Cold War by the Thai state and Communist Party in the northeast.
Fereshteh Toosi
Fereshteh Toosi’s cross-disciplinary art work involves embodied experiences, encounter, exchange, and sensory inquiry. Her participatory projects take the form of guided walks, hands-on gardening activities, and kayak excursions accompanied by audio and video recordings and transmissions. These intimate, contemplative performances take place in gardens, parks, and waterways. The live events often result in the creation of small sculptures, short films, sound art, installations, scores, and poetry. Born in Iran and raised in the U.S., she studied at Oberlin College and Carnegie Mellon University, where she earned an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art. Fereshteh is an Assistant Professor in the Art and Art History department at Florida International University.
SIM Hoi Ling
Sim Hoi Ling is a visual arts graduate, majoring Diploma in Fine Arts under full scholarship grant provided by Dasein Academy of Art. Sim is interested in the human condition, waste materials, and the geographic and materiality of found items, this transcends from physical to the aural region. Her fascination in people interacting with a work in space leading her towards the exploration of installation and media. Currently, Sim uses found objects, photographs, sound, installation, performance and drawings as devices in her artistic exploration. She releases her experimental sound works under the group name DSGN.
SAM I-shan
Sam I-shan is a curator at National Gallery Singapore, working on modern and contemporary Singapore art with an interest in time-based media, and art and politics. She was previously curator at Singapore Art Museum and Esplanade Visual Arts, focusing on the moving image and photography from Southeast Asia and wider Asia. At Esplanade, she curated and managed new commissions and site- specific exhibitions with emerging and familiar artists from the region. She also headed film and moving image initiatives at SAM including Artist Films, while co- programming the Southeast Asian Film Festival.
Jeanne Penjan Lassus
Jeanne Penjan is a Thai-French artist based in Bangkok. She graduated from the Fine Art School of Paris. She imagines her works as fragments that echo each other in space. Videos, photographs and texts function as constellations, each island being autonomous and creating its own time. Perceptions, both imagined and physical, and subtle transformations of space are recurrent threads of reflection in her practice.
John Torres
John Torres is an independent filmmaker, musician and writer. His work fictionalizes and reworks personal and found documentations of love, family relations and memory in relation to current events, hearsay, myth and folklore. His latest work, People Power Bombshell: The Diary of Vietnam Rose (2016), is a film composed of decaying 35mm footage of an unfinished film from the 80s, mixed with new footage and sound interviews of the original cast, edited to sound like dialogue in a documentary that tells of their whole ordeal of making a film at the hands of a prominent Filipino director. John teaches part-time at the Ateneo de Manila University. He conducts filmmaking workshops and co-organizes artist talks and screenings in Los Otros, a Manila-based space, film lab, and platform committed to the intersections of film and art, with a focus on process over product.
Julian Ross, Animistic Apparatus organiser
Julian is a curator of film and performance. He is a Programmer at International Film Festival Rotterdam and Film Festival Locarno and Research Fellow at the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media, University of Westminster. His recent curatorial projects include Blackout, an exhibition and a series of performances highlighting contemporary artists’ uses of the 35mm carousel slide projector (Kunsthal, Rotterdam; Ambika P3, London; Greylight Project, Brussels). His curatorial projects have been presented at Tate Modern, Art Institute of Chicago, BOZAR Centre for Fine Arts, Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, British Film Institute, Eye Film Institute, Harvard Film Archive, Anthology Film Archives, Light Industry, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and other institutions.
Kridpuj Dhansandors
Kridpuj is a final year medical student at Khon Kaen University. He began to take an interest in cinema in his second year of study after watching Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cemetery of Splendour. At KKU he set up a film club in his faculty to show documentary films, and he expanded his film activities to curating film programmes for festivals across Isaan (northeast Thailand). These programmes have been shown outdoors and at galleries. He combines studying medicine with film curating and writing film reviews.
Mary Pansanga, Animistic Apparatus organiser
Mary Pansanga is an independent curator working across cinema and contemporary art contexts, institutions and spaces. Her interests lie in exploring different forms of experimental moving images. She has put together screenings, exhibitions and other related projects, at art spaces and film festivals. Her projects include Extracting the Unrecognized (2013) as part of Messy Project Space, “Live at the Scala” micro festival, In Transit (2013) at the Art Center, Chulalongkorn University, Multiple Planes, Bangkok Art and Culture Centre as part of PhotoBangkok (2018) and the 5th and the 6th editions of the Bangkok Experimental Film Festival, Misfits: Pages from a Loose Leaf Modernity, HKW Berlin (2017), In Situ from Outside: Reconfiguring the Past in between the Present, National Museum, Bangkok (2019). She is a founder of the ongoing project ‘cloud’, a platform for communication, education and open-ended dialogue.
May Adadol Ingawanij, Animistic Apparatus organiser
May Adadol Ingawanij is a writer, curator and teacher. Her research explores genealogies of cinematic and media apparatus; potentialities of contemporary artistic and curatorial practice; and artists’ moving image, art and independent cinema in, around and beyond Southeast Asia. Animistic Apparatus is part of her British Academy-funded book and curatorial project Contemporary Art and Animistic Cinematic Medium in Southeast Asia. May teaches at the University of Westminster where she co-directs the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media. Her recent curatorial projects include Lav Diaz: Journeys (London, 2017); On Attachments and Unknowns (Phnom Penh, 2017); Southern Collectives (Buenos Aires, 2016); Comparing Experimental Cinemas (Bangalore, 2015).
Pam Virada Banjurtrungkajorn
Pam Virada establishes her work via the multiple disciplines of photography, moving images, and installation. Her works present whispers of intimate turmoils, utterances of muffled statements (one that proclaims themselves softly yet consistently through spending time with the project, as well as the works spending time in their contexts). Recent works include Window: To See a Parallel Place (2015), a triptych video installation shot with Super 8 film camera demonstrating the act of looking into windows as a metaphor for the crave-for-escape; inviting the audience into experiencing escapism. clouded (2018), carefully arranged boxes alongside dust which was scraped off the floor where a storage shelf of a halogen lightbulb box once sat stares back at you as a cruel reminder that all history is fictional.
Panachai Chaijirarat, Animistic Apparatus organiser
Oui Panachai finished his MA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art and Design in London. He has exhibited in London and Bangkok. He is now based in Udon Thani where he has another career as a retailer and fabricator in the construction business, which informs his practice. Ranging from mixed media sculpture to immersive installation, his works convey sociological meaning usually through the use of found objects, preferentially industrial ones. He has been involved in several art initiatives such as TAIL (Thai Art Initiative in London) and Noir Art Collective. At the present he runs Noir Row Art Space in Udon Thani.
Pathompon Mont Tesprateep
Mont Pathompon was born in Bangkok and raised in Isan (the northeastern region of Thailand). He graduated with an MFA from Chelsea College of Arts in London and has participated in Berlinale Talents. Since 2014, he has been working on a series of hand-processed 16mm and S-8 short films: Endless, Nameless (2014), Song X (2017) and Confusion Is Next (2018). His films have been shown at film festivals, including Locarno Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, BFI London Film Festival, Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, Les Rencontres Internationales, Curtas Vila do Conde, Hamburg International Short Film Festival. He is currently developing his first feature film.
Porntep Petchsamrit
Mh Porntep lives and works in Bangkok as an independent producer and project manager of Thong Lor Art Space. He was born in Chiangmai and graduated in Thai Architecture from Silpakorn University. He was recently part of the Low Fat Art Fes vol. 3. Porntep is interested in exploring the potential of outdoor-ritual film screenings as a platform for presenting and distributing alternative films and a context for commissioning artists’ works.
Puiyee Leong
Leong Puiyee is the Programme Manager of the Singapore International Film Festival (SGIFF). She is also a Manager at Objectifs Centre for Photography and Film where is she responsible for the film programmes and projects. She has managed film events such as the Singapore Short Film Awards, cINE65 Short Film Competition and the Fly By Night Video Challenge. She was part of the pre- selection committee of the 2017 and 2018 SEAShorts Film Festival in Malaysia. She was also part of the selection committee of the inaugural Singapore Shorts 2018 programme, organised by the Asian Film Archive. Puiyee graduated
with a diploma in Arts Management from Lasalle College of the Arts.
Punyisa Sinraparatsamee, Animistic Apparatus organiser
Som Punyisa (b. 1991, Bangkok) is an artist/sculptor in Thailand. She graduated with a major in sculpture from King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology, Ladkrabang, in 2013, and has taught art at Assumption College in Bangkok. Her works interact with time, history and memory. She has been awarded multiple prizes including the Grand Prize of the 10th Young Thai Artist Award (2014), and Prize for Excellence at the 12th Oita Asian Sculpture Contest (Japan 2014). She was selected by the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum to participate in its artist residency programme in 2016.
Red (Nguyen Hai Yen)
Red (b.1994, Vietnam) plays with (sign) language(s), water, mirror and emptiness. She started practising moving image at Hanoi Doclab from 2015, and has been doing experimental poetry performances since 2016. Her short films include Homeless (2016), Water dreams (2016) and Summer siesta: 6th hour counting from dawn (2017). Water Dreams won first prize for Quest x Doclab Short Film Competition. Summer siesta… was exhibited at Fundacion PROA (Argentina). Red is a member of AJAR Press, an independent publishing house based in Hanoi that supports underground voices.
Rei Hayama
Rei Hayama lives and works in Tokyo. She works mainly with moving image, and is one of the founding members of the Tokyo film collective, “[+]”. She studied at the Department of Moving Images and Performing Arts, Tama Art University, and has been making films since 2008. Hayama’s films revolve around nature and all other living things that have been lost or neglected from an anthropocentric point of view. Her works have exhibited and screened internationally at Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, New York’s Museum of the Moving Image, Bergen Kunsthall, Tromsø International Film Festival, and Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival, amongst others.
Riar Rizaldi
Riar Rizaldi works as an artist and researcher. He was born in Indonesia and he’s currently based in Hong Kong. His main focus is on the relationship between human-nonhuman and technology, consumer electronics, extractivism, and theory-fiction. Through his works, he questions the notion of (a)temporality, image politics, materiality, media archaeology and unanticipated consequences of technologies.
lololol collective (Sheryl Cheung, Xia Lin)
lololol is a Taipei-based art collective founded by experimental musician Sheryl Cheung and multimedia artist Xia Lin. lololol produces collaborative art projects and community-engaging events that reflect upon the fast-changing meanings of nature, embodiment and togetherness in the age of Anthropocene. In 2017, lololol initiated “Future Tao” as a long-term project about experimental mind and body practices that reconsider Taoist informed ideas of technology with contemporary imagination. How are ancient strivings towards expanded consciousness, energy cultivation and union between man and nature relevant in today’s context? The project seeks to harness the collaborative potential between old and new technologies in search of self-cultivation methods appropriate for today.
Shireen Seno
Shireen Seno is an artist and filmmaker whose work addresses memory, history, and image-making, often in relation to the idea of home. She is a recipient of the 2018 Thirteen Artists Award from the Cultural Center of the Philippines. Her second film, Nervous Translation (2018), is about a girl who finds out about a pen that can translate the thoughts and feelings of nervous people. It premiered at Rotterdam in Hivos Tiger Competition and won the NETPAC Award for Best Asian Film. Curatorial projects include Christian Tablazon’s solo exhibition ‘And the World Thickens with Texture Instead of History’, Takahiko Iimura’s ‘Circle+Square’ in Manila, INSTRUCTIONS: a ‘video without video’ exhibit for PABLO Gallery’s 10th anniversary, and The Kalampag Tracking Agency, a program of experimental film and video from the Philippines over the past 30 years. She and John Torres run Los Otros, a Manila-based studio and platform dedicated to the intersections of film and art.
Sompot Chidgasornpongse
Sompot Chidgasornpongse (Boat) graduated with a bachelor’s degree in architecture from Chulalongkorn university, and an MFA in Film/Video from California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). He’s been working closely with Apichatpong Weerasethakul as assistant director in many projects, including ‘Tropical Malady’, ‘Syndromes and a Century’, ‘Cemetery of Splendour’, ‘Fever Room’, etc. His personal shorts were shown at various international film festivals around the world, such as Oberhausen, Rotterdam, Viennale, Visions du Réel, Signes de Nuit, Indielisboa, etc. He’s also a Berlinale Talents alumnus (as director and editor). His films explore the possibility of representing everyday life in a creative and thought- provoking way. His first feature documentary, ‘Railway Sleepers’ (produced by Apichatpong Weerasethakul), was in Documentary Competition at Busan International Film Festival, and had its European premiere in the Forum section at Berlin International Film Festival. Sompot is now based in Bangkok.
Thanawat Phappayon
Thanawat Phappayon is an itinerant film project troupe led by technician, projectionist and collector Kasem Khamnak. They install and operate outdoor film projection events in and around Udon Thani province in northeast Thailand for entrepreneurial, cultural and ritual purposes.
Taiki Sakpisit
Taiki (b.1975, Japan) is an artist and filmmaker based in Bangkok. His films create haunting evocations of memory through the repetition and imperceptible manipulation of images that interweave found footage and archival material. His works are often related to the tumultuous socio-political climate in Thailand. Taiki’s most recent solo exhibition Until the Morning Comes took place at S.A.C. Subhashok The Arts Centre, Bangkok, Thailand (2018). His film The Mental Traveller (2018) screened in competition in the short films programme of the 2019 Rotterdam International Film Festival. He was recently artist-in-residence at NTU Centre for Contemporary Art.
Tanatchai Bandasak
Art Tanatchai (b. 1984, Thailand) is a visual artist whose practice spans a variety of mediums including video, photography, and installation. Often drawing on his interests in light, living matter, habitat, and geology, his works interrogate the nature of existence and the substance of things to deepen our perception of the world. Recent exhibitions include Appearing Unannounced, Rirkrit Tiravanija’s studio, Tambon Nam-bo-luang, Chiang Mai, Thailand (2018). Tanatchai has also produced several moving-image works which have been screened at international film festivals such the “Spectrum Shorts” section of the 41st International Film Festival Rotterdam, Netherlands (2012) and Rencontres Internationales, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France (2011). He is currently artist-in-residence at NTU Centre for Contemporary Art.
Nguyen Trinh Thi
Thi is a Hanoi-based independent filmmaker and video/media artist. Her diverse practice has consistently investigated the role of memory in the necessary unveiling of hidden, displaced or misinterpreted histories; and examined the position of artists in the Vietnamese society. Thi studied journalism, photography, international relations and ethnographic film in the United States. Her films and video art works have been shown widely at festivals and art exhibitions including Biennale of Sydney 2018; Jeu de Paume, Paris; CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux; the Lyon Biennale 2015; Asian Art Biennial 2015, Taiwan; Fukuoka Asian Art Triennial 2014. Thi is founder and director of Hanoi DOCLAB, an independent center for documentary film and the moving image art in Hanoi.
Tulapop Saenjaroen
Tulapop (b.1986) is an artist/filmmaker whose works encompass performance, video/film, and public projects. He holds an MFA from the Slade School of Art, University College London, and MA in Aesthetics and Politics program at the California Institute of Arts. He was a recipient of Experimental Film/Video Grant from Office of Contemporary Art and Culture, Ministry of Culture, Thailand. His short film A Room with a Coconut View (2018) screened at Locarno Film Festival, Rotterdam International Film Festival, Harvard Film Archive, and won the International Competition prize at Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur, Arkipel Festival Jakarta, Moscow International Experimental Film Festival. He also worked as an associate producer and a casting director for Anocha Suwichakornpong’s By the Time It Gets Dark (2016).
Umi Lestari
Umi (b. Gunung Kidul, Indonesia, 1988) is an independent researcher and film critic based in Yogyakarta and Indonesia. Before focusing on research about Indonesian cinema and comedy in Indonesia during and after Cold War, she worked in Forum Lenteng, Jakarta and Indonesian Visual Art Archive. She graduated with an MA in Religious and Cultural Studies, Sanata Dharma University, Yogyakarta. Previously Umi was a film selector for Arkipel – International Documentary and Experimental Film Festival (2015 – 2016); Indonesia Appreciation Film Festival (2015) and Indonesia Student Film Festival 2019 conducted by
Ministry of Education of Indonesia.
Vipas Prachyaporn
Vipas identifies himself as much an anthropologist as an artisan. His MA anthropology dissertation discussed the concept of self, identity formation and knowledge practices from his field research as an apprentice of cabinet makers in a semi-industrial workshop in Pathumthani. His current research focuses on the transformation of personhood in late-socialist Laos, where he also has a keen interest on relations between the state, lottery and popular ghost stories. His contribution to the workshop will include both artisanal and non artisanal skills: woodworking, sewing, welding and electricity.
Wiwat Lertwiwatwongsa
Chai Wiwat is a member of Filmvirus, an informal grouping of cinephile activists that periodically come together to organise film screenings and film publications. He writes film reviews and columns for Bioscope magazine and the website The Momentum. He is also involved with Documentary Club, which organises film festivals and special screenings.
Zai Tang
Zai (b. 1984, London) is an artist currently based in Singapore. In his solo practise he experiments with the abstraction and visualisation of field recordings from natural environments, as a means of responding to the spectre of mass extinction. Once abstracted from their original state these sonorities are combined with other elements – drawing, animation, projection and / or performance – to create immersive and reflexive experiences that explore notions of awareness and connection between the human and the nonhuman. As a collaborator he plays the role of composer, sound designer and experimental musician across different contexts; from contemporary dance and film to architecture and visual art installations. Since 2006 he has been presenting solo and collaborative work locally and internationally, including at: The Second Yinchuan Biennale, China (2018), Singapore International Festival of the Arts (2017), National Gallery Singapore (2017), Saatchi Gallery, London (2013). He has been collaborating with artist Lucy Davis on The Migrant Ecologies Project.