‘A City Fluctuates, A Swarm Echoes: Rhythm and Southeast Asian Contemporary Artist Cinema’
The 2025 Linda Nochlin Lecture at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
18 November 2025
How to sense, speak of, and think with flux, intensity, and duration in artist cinema? This lecture foregrounds a constellation of moving image works by Lucy Davis and her collaborative Migrant Ecologies Project (MEP), Sasithorn Ariyavicha, Sriwhana Spong, Anocha Suwichakornpong, Thao Nguyen Phan, and Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook to think about animistic poetics of relations, becoming, and historical entanglement. Considering the forms and values of rhythmic indeterminacy in Southeast Asian contemporary artist cinema requires attending to structural conditions of circulation and discourse in the acutely contradictory field of global contemporary art, including the emergence of ecological aesthetics and the ways these artists’ works circulate within categories of “artist cinema,” the “Southeast Asian contemporary artist,” and the “woman artist.” Highlighting vulnerability, asymmetry, and other forms ill-aligned with masculinist histories of revolution, lineage, and vanguardism, the lecture proposes a definition of Southeast Asian contemporary artist cinema as an institutionally dependent poetics of relations, futuristic returns, and openness toward the unknown.