‘Animistic Medium: Genealogy of Performativity and Southeast Asian Contemporary Art,’ keynote lecture at Pathways of Performativity in Southeast Asian Art symposium, Haus der Kunst Munich, 27-28 July 2019.
Watch video recording here.
Thinking ontologically in film, media and art entails thinking with an emblematic scene, figure, or myth of origin. In the intellectual history of western film theory, for instance, such established figures have included the cave, the disembodied gaze in the dark, and the spectators fleeing the screen. If we were to experiment with this kind of thinking by setting forth from Southeast Asia, what would be those exemplary scenes, figures, and myths with which to ask questions of ontology? How might we proceed from a practice, a history, a fragment, a genealogy of medium or aesthetic practice located somewhere in or across Southeast Asia, in order to ask foundational questions in art, film and media theory such as: What is image? How are images and objects animate? How do expressive forms address and enunciate?
This talk takes up the scene of animistic offering rituals as that emblematic scene with which to theorise the question of performativity of address and enunciation. I will explore the question of artistic address and enunciation in Southeast Asian contemporary art in constellation with this emblematic scene of human-nonhuman communication: itinerant film projection rituals performed as an offering addressed to powerful nonhuman presence in and around Thailand during the Cold War. The talk approaches ritualistic practices and repertoires of making offerings to spirits and powerful nonhuman beings as a site for thinking the potentiality of an expressive and performative praxis whereby powerless and precarious humans make utterances and gestures entwining bodily, material, installative, and technological practices and tools, as enunciations addressing powerful nonhuman forces and beings. Approaching the moving image practices of such artists as Korakrit Arunanondchai (No History in a Room Filled with People with Funny Names 5), Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook (An Artist Is Trying to Return to ‘Being a Writer’), Ho Tzu Nyen (The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia), Lav Diaz (A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery), Anocha Suwichakornpong (By the Time it Gets Dark), and Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Fireworks (Archives)) in proximity with animistic projection rituals opens up generative ways of thinking about the obliqueness and idiosyncrasies of touch, illumination, scale, duration, and utterance that make these artists’ handling of questions of social violence, historical destruction, and collective experiences of dislocation so strikingly challenging to description and interpretation. The talk identifies the following tendencies among this group of artistic practices: preoccupation with unknowability, form as germination and life, and intensity of scalar shifts and sensations playing on the limit of human perceptual capacity.