Southeast Asian Video Screening featuring work by Kok Siew Wai and friends.

http://bsap08.blogspot.com

Southeast Asian Video Screening will be held at Valentine Willie Fine Art Project Room
from 20 September - 11 October 2008. The exhibition highlights some of the most
exciting and challenging screen-based practices from Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and
the Philippines.

Working in collaboration with curators around the region, the screening brings together
video works and experimental films from four neighbouring countries, providing
Malaysian audience with a rare opportunity to study and compare the various trends and
styles in video art that has emerged through the different contexts and cultures that have
made Southeast Asia a diverse and complex region.

From Indonesia, art curator Agung Hujatnikajennong features in his broad yet in-depth
survey, some of the most exciting artists from Bandung, Yogyakarta and Jakarta working
with the video medium. Manila-based film critic and lecturer Alexis Tioseco will compile a
selection of video works that not only looks into the formal innovation of emerging Filipino
names but also engages with the socio-cultural history of the nation.

'The More Things Change...', curated by David Teh, will showcase Thai experimental
shorts from this year's Bangkok Experimental Film Festival. Last but not least, Simon Soon and Erna Dyanty will curate a Malaysian survey that identifies various approaches and trajectories in local experimental film-making.

For screening schedule, please visit http://bsap08.blogspot.com

Please join us for drinks with Bombay Sapphire this Saturday (20 September 2008) at 7:30pm on our opening night.

Valentine Willie Fine Art
1st Floor, No. 17, Jalan Telawi 3,
Bangsar Baru
59100 Kuala Lumpur

+603 2284 2348
or email simon@vwfa.net

WORKS:

Thailand

Nitipong Thinthupthai, 'Krasob'

Nawapol Tahmrongrattanarit, 'Bangkok Tanks'

Pathompol Tesprateep, '4 Feb 2006 Live @ Bangkok Code'

Arpapun Plungsirisoontorn, 'Repeating Drama'

Micahel Shaowanasai, 'Observation of the Monument'

Pramote Saengsorn, 'Observation of the Monk'

Thunska Pansittivorakul, 'Middle Earth'

Uruphong Raksasad, 'Roy Tai Phrae'

Jakwawal Niltumrong, 'Man with a Video Camera'

Anocha Suwichakornpong, 'Black Mirror'

Malaysia

Chris Chong 'Kolam' & 'Minus'

Azhar Rudin 'Eaten by Time'

Chi Too 'Reading Kafka in America'

Idora Alhabsih 'Overall Condition: Normal'

Nazim Esa 'For the Love of Drowning'

Au Sow Yee 'Passing II'

Kok Siew Wai 'Leap'

Chan Seau Huvi 'I want to be a Good Woman' & 'Butterfly'

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c u r a t e d b y S i m o n S o o n & E r n a D y a n t y

In compiling a survey of Malaysian video works for the Southeast Asian Video Screening, all attempts at defining an all-over thematic or visual trend from our selection were largely abandoned. Instead, we began charting the various forms of experimentation that video artists have engaged in. This, in turn, complicates the discourse that experimental video exists as a uniformed aesthetic that is largely esoteric and inaccessible. Interestingly, we found that recent video works highlighted in our Malaysian screening can be contextualis ed within three main trajectories.

Filmmakers such as Azharr Rudin and Nazim Esa who use short films or experimental videos as their platform for bolder exploration of the medium constitute the first category. While they are just as comfortable with working on the feature film format, often it is through their short films that the alternative and interesting approaches to narration are explored.

Contrary to the fictive immersion of the short narratives, we have also identified a number of filmmakers and video artists such as Chris Chong and Chi Too who have worked within the documentary genre. Often, these works are more critical of the language of visual representation than their usual documentary counterpart, playing with and investigating into new structures of signification that can affect a different understanding and experience of the social as well as the personal.

The third trajectory can be considered to be geographically specific and formalist in orientation. Au Sow Yee, Kok Siew Wai and Chan Seau Huvi are all active participants in SicKL, a studio for experimentation with various artistic disciplines. Monthly performances are held in their Cheras (a suburb in Kuala Lumpur) studio, featuring poetry recitals as well as sound, video and performance art. They represent both a more performative approach to video art - video as a documentation of female bodily drives (Siew Wai and Huvi) - as well as an interest in exploring abstraction through the video medium (Sow Yee). As such their works often push the boundaries of video art further, turning to consider the fundamental aspects of the medium.

Last but not least, we have also included a short work by Idora Alhabsih, who is still completing her studies in filmmaking overseas, as an indication of a direction that an emerging generation of artists who have increasingly found video to be both an affordable and challenging medium to base their artistic practice on.

Across these disparate trajectories, Malaysian experimental video and film draw strength from its diverse approaches – short narrative, experimental documentary, video abstraction, and performative documentation. Many of them propose new visual structures of conveying meaning that disrupts the homogenised format of the feature film. Its heterogeneity, as noted by David Teh (curator of the Thai compilation), could challenge the safe experience of the easily consumable feature film, which ultimately provokes us to think more critically through its stimulating formal registers.