London Gallery West and Regent Street Cinema, University of Westminster
27 January – 12 March 2017
The first extensive London exhibition of the durationally extreme films of Lav Diaz, one of the greatest radical artists of contemporary cinema. London Gallery West, Regent Street Cinema, University of Westminster.
This project explores the possibilities and challenges of exhibiting durationally extreme films in multiple spatial, institutional and discursive contexts. It utilises a speculative approach to exhibiting Diaz’s long films, informed by my involvement in the past decade with curating his works with translocal networks of artists-led and cinephiles groups in Southeast Asia and Europe; and my research on the exhibition history of Diaz’s works, especially the frictions they generate with institutional modes of exhibiting and valuing his films under the paradigm of the world cinema auteur. <em>Lav Diaz: Journeys</em> proposes a model of curating radical films and artists’ moving image as a combined practice of curatorial activism and a mode of participatory spectatorship developed in parallel contexts of cultural infrastructural unevenness in the global south, and the decline of institutional funding in the west.
Exhibition
A gallery exhibition of a rotating programme of six very long films by Diaz, and a theatrical screening of 35mm archival print of Diaz’s earlier work with director’s attendance.
27 January–2 February, start times 9am and 3pm
From What is Before (2014), 338 minutes
Philippines 1970, two years before the declaration of martial law. A poet returns to his village.
3–9 February, start time 10am
Heremias (Book One: The Legend of the Lizard Princess) (2006), 510 minutes
A timid yet resolute vendor seeks answers about the theft of his cow.
10–16 February, start time 10am
Death in the Land of Encantos (2007), 540 minutes
Shot in the Bicol region immediately after a devastating typhoon. A left intellectual and poet returns from Russia to his hometown.
17–23 February, start times 9am and 3pm
Batang West Side (2001), 300 minutes
A Jersey cop investigates the murder of a young Filipino on West Side Avenue.
24 February–2 March, start time 10am
A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery (2016), 485 minutes
A cinematic dialogue with José Rizal’s foundational Filipino novel El Filibusterismo, set during the Spanish crushing of Filipino independence. The wife of revolutionary leader Andres Bonifacio searches in the forest for his body.
3–12 March, start times 10am and 3pm
The Woman Who Left (2016), 226 minutes
Inspired by Tolstoy’s God Sees the Truth, But Waits. A woman wrongly imprisoned is released after 30 years and goes in search of the man who put her there.
Gallery talks
Accompanying the screening programme is a wide-ranging conversation series with artists, academics, curators and exhibitors in response to Diaz’s films.
4 February, 2pm
Award-winning Filipino contemporary artist Pio Abad will be in conversation with the exhibition curators on the significance of Diaz’s films and mode of artistic practice in the contexts of contemporary cinema and national political history.
5 February, 2pm
Conversation between MUBI film programmer and University of Westminster graduate Chiara Marañón and curator Adam Roberts (A Nos Amours) on historical and contemporary experimentations with exhibiting durational moving image works.
12 February, 2pm
Diaz’s films have come to be associated with slow cinema. Film theorist Tiago de Luca will be in conversation with curator Dan Kidner about the theoretical and curatorial value of such terminology.
18 February, 2pm
Diaz’s films carry the legacy of third cinema and their critical exploration of political messianism. Film theorist Professor Lucia Nagib and art historian Professor Ashley Thompson will discuss the entanglement between the aesthetically radical and the theological.
Symposium
Accompanying Lav Diaz Journeys is an international symposium exploring the significance of Diaz’s films and mode of artistic practice.
The symposium features theoretical and practice research signalling the importance of a multidisciplinary frame for thinking about Diaz’s works.
Speakers range from those working in film theory and criticism, film-philosophy, curatorial practice, anthropology and political theory. Divergent presentations will reflect on the challenges that Diaz’s works pose to the conceptualisation of cinematic temporality, space, materiality, spectatorship and realism, and to theorisation of the limit and potential of the idea of cinema in the digital age.