ANIMISTIC APPARATUS

A curatorial research project committed and connected to Southeast Asia exploring the relational, futurist, and agentive forms of artists’ cinema.

Animistic Apparatus places Southeast Asian contemporary artists’ 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.

My accompanying monograph in progress, Animistic Medium: Contemporary Southeast Asian Artists’ Moving Image, pursues two related concerns: to understand the relationship between Southeast Asian legacies of vanguardism and contemporary artistic practices, and to think about the aesthetic and agentive tendencies of Southeast Asian contemporary artists’ moving image. The artistic practices the book thinks with include those by Lav Diaz, Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Anocha Suwichakornpong, Nguyen Trinh Thi, Korakrit Arunanondchai, Ho Tzu Nyen, Kidlat Tahimik, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, and Riar Rizaldi.

Animistic Medium tries to understand what has become of the avant-garde’s aspiration to change life. It asks: What are the characteristics of contemporary Southeast Asian artists’ moving image practices? How are they connected with the failures and the aftermath of the region’s historical vanguardism? The project considers the intertwining of the afterlife of regional and national vanguardism, the structures and networks of production and circulation of artistic practice in global contemporary art, and the aesthetics and poetics of Southeast Asian contemporary artists’ moving image. My proposition is that Southeast Asian contemporary artists’ moving image are practices that make animistic medium within circuits of global contemporary art. My book thinks the contradictions and potentialities of Southeast Asian artists’ cinema by essaying the resonances between regional artistic agency and regional animism, defining this mode of artistic practice as a post-vanguardist praxis of relating, living and future-imagining in vast worlds of hierarchies, mobilities, and entanglements. 

Animistic Apparatus kins include Julian Ross, Tanatchai Bandasak, Mary Pansanga, Noir Row Art Space , Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival, and many more. It is indebted to the generosity and gift of creation of the artists, curators and thinkers that feed its endeavours. The project has received funding from the British Academy, Purin Pictures, Japan Foundation, Alliance Francaise, Asia-Europe Foundation, and others.