26 January – 2 February 2025
Screening programmes guest curated with Julian Ross for BEFF7 (curated by Mary Pansanga)
SMALL HOURS OF THE NIGHT (Daniel HUI, 2024)
Singapore, in the late 1960s — the newly independent country is still grappling with its identity. In a dark room, a woman is trapped, being interrogated by a man. Through the course of one long night, identities and duration start to blur. Ghosts from the future haunt their conversation, telling of a bizarre tombstone trial that speaks to the state’s nascent political and legal landscape.
NOX (cinematic version) (Lawrence LEK, 2023)
NOX (short for ‘Nonhuman Excellence) was originally commissioned as a site-specific installation at LAS Art Foundation in Berlin.
HAND & SKIN screening programme
Artists: Diana Cam Van Nguyen, Ai Ozaki, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Hsu Che-yu, Maryam Tafakory
Layering, drawing and writing on image surfaces can be revelatory. Such artistic acts of animating exceed the limitation of the frame and the naturalistic image. Sometimes they can bring to life what had initially felt impossible. This is particularly the case when live-action images coexist with graphic and abstract forms of animation in broader conditions of crisis, chaos and repression. As old as cinema itself, techniques of animating and layering have evolved over the years from hand-scratched, hand-written or hand-painted overlays to more recent digital 3-D animation. In an age where screens and images proliferate in our daily surroundings, and when censorship continues to plague cinema, such hybrid aesthetics speak to our everyday lives and lend themselves as creative resources for imagining other ways to coexist.
This programme brings together a number of works by contemporary artists who utilise animation and image-layering as part of their practice. Playful, intimate and surprising, these works destablise the real/documentary image and gesture towards cinematic possibilities beyond the restrictions of the present. The artists use techniques ranging from hand-drawn sketches, colour filters, text movements and layers, to manipulations of 3-D mapping. Their works bridge geographical, social, emotional and temporal distances, offering a way of sensing artistic and existential possibilities beyond the immediately visible and the permissible.
Curated by May Adadol Ingawanij and Julian Ross
LOVE, DAD (Diana Cam Van Nguyen, 2021)
Diana Cam Van Nguyen is a Czech-Vietnamese filmmaker who makes animated documentaries exploring personal topics. “I found these letters from my father that I was keeping all the time, but didn’t remember that I had them. So when I read them again, I just noticed that there were so many feelings and so much love that I don’t see from my father anymore, so I had the idea that maybe I could do a film about it.” (Interview with May Ngo)
JOY OF LIFE (Ai Ozaki, 2016)
Ai Ozaki is a visual artist who works with video, sound, photography, ceramics, text and painting. She researches and produces works around the themes of sex and eating. “The reason for addressing ‘sex’ and ‘eating’ is that everyone has a body, and also comes from my parents’ job, pixelation to hide genital parts of pornographic videos in Japan. The people touching each other on screen were like animals. When I look at th ka e behavior of animals and living things, it looks like a microcosm of life.” (Rijksakademie)
SINGLE COPY (Hsu Che-yu, 2019)
Hsu Che-yu is a Taiwanese artist who primarily creates animations, videos, and installations that feature the relations between media and memories. Single Copy is made with his long-term collaborator the scriptwriter Chen Wan-Yin. “I produce a digital-scan model and fiberglass cast of the first Taiwanese conjoined twins, using archival data as a source to capture memories from the early life of one of the twins, Chang Chung-I. Through this process, I aim to explore the dynamics of biopolitics and the mechanisms of memory. The conjoined twins underwent a separation surgery in 1979, which was broadcast on television. At the time, Taiwan was under martial law, and the surgery was often viewed as a metaphor for the relationship between Taiwan and China.”
FICTION (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2018)
night-time, fluorescent lamps buzzing and scuttling insects
a hand writing in a blank book, writing and attempting to record a dream.
The image envelopes the viewer, the projection plays on all surfaces
insects, hand and lights slide across the floor
dream and reality collide
(Kick the Machine)
BEFF7 is pleased to present Apichatpong’s Fiction as a single-screen cinematic projection. This work is originally shown as a video installation.
RAZEH-DEL (Maryam Tafakory, 2024)
Born and raised in Iran and based in the UK, Maryam Tafakory is a moving image and performance artist. She makes poetic collages from archival materials and fragments of post-revolutionary Iranian films to address censorship and prohibition. She is the recipient of the 2024 Film London Jarman Award.
In 1998, two schoolgirls sent a letter to Iran’s first-ever women’s newspaper. While they waited to be published, they considered making an impossible film. Using citations and image intervention, Razeh-del journeys through parallel histories of war on images of women.