Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Work-in-progress

Monday Will Come (working title, 2009)
A work-in-progress parts of the trilogy focusing on Burmese immigrants in the Netherlands and Thailand. Expected to complete in August 2009. The film focuses on Mon women of different generations in Samutsakorn, Thailand. (more info will be updated/for other two previous works in trilogy please see the main website http://www.leavetoremain.com/)

Essay for Printed Projects: Issue 11

Sopawan Boonnimitra
February, 2009
For Printed Projects - will be presented at Venice Biennial in June 09

Southeast Asian Cinema in the Reflection of Post-Third-Worldist Cinema: A Contemplative Space for Dialogue


1

On the brink of the world economic collapse, Southeast Asia is caught in-between. While many countries have taken their steady turn in economic prosperity over the past decade, the new crisis promises yet another apocalypse. By being at the other end of the consumer chain than the West, Southeast Asia is left to ponder on its own as there are no more products to be made and sent to be assembled somewhere in China before being shipped to the West. Many of the countries are yet again facing a re-examination of the self, as happened during the Asian financial crisis of 1997-1998. Such a complex process is perhaps best epitomized by the art practices and filmmaking in the region since then. While these art practices and films are locally rooted, they have also found fame elsewhere and become a main attraction in international venues, particularly since the beginning of the new millennium, where the focus on cinematic works has shifted significantly from East Asia to Southeast Asia, particularly through the films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Thailand), Raya Martin (the Philippines), Nia Dinata (Indonesia), Riri Riza (Indonesia), and Ming Nguyen-Vo (Vietnam), among many others that have circulated internationally.

These cinematic works combine the local roots of folktales and storytelling with the influence of Western aesthetics, particularly the Western avant-gardes and European art cinema. The strategy is similar to what Rey Chow has described as ‘auto-ethnography’ in the work of Zhang Yimou. For Chow, Zhang “is showing a ‘China’ that is at one subalternized and exoticised by the West” and the ethnicity of his films returns “the gaze of orientalist surveillance, a gaze that demands of non-Western peoples mythical pictures and stories to which convenient labels of otherness such as ‘China’, ‘India’, ‘Africa’, and so forth can be affixed”.[1] While successfully accommodating to Western tastes and standards set by the elite group who runs international film festivals, these films capture the imagined Southeast Asia in the midst of urban decay, state censorship, gender inequality, as well as presenting what Zhang Yingjin calls ‘the magic ingredients’, as he refers to the international success of Fifth Generation Chinese films, which include: primitive landscape (including savage rivers, mountains, forests, deserts), repressed sexuality and its eruption in transgressive moments of eroticism, gender performance and sexual exhibition (including homosexuality, transvestism, adultery, incest), and a mythical or cyclical time frame in which the protagonist’s fate is predestined.[2]

While these elements of exoticism and primitivism continue to be explored in the above films, as with the Fifth Generation films, they have created a complex space for an on-going dialogue between Southeast Asia and the West as well as with the self. Whereas these filmmakers acquire different modes of filmmaking from the mainstream of their own countries and dominant modes of Hollywood filmmaking and pursue a more alternative path favoured by international film festivals, in a way it is not a surrender to the cultural power of the West but rather these films position themselves critically vis-à-vis their own filmmaking industry and dominant ideology and are used as a mask to counter the dominant narrative of the nation as a unified entity. Their transgressive intentions are borne out by trouble with the authorities and they have been under the pressure to censor out parts of the films, such as four scenes in Weerasethakul’s Syndromes and a Century (Thailand, 2006): the monk playing with the motor plane, the monk playing the guitar, the doctors drinking whiskey, and the young doctor getting an erection in the hospital; the controversial subject of polygamy from women's point of view in Dinata’s Love for Share (Indonesia, 2006); and the accusation by the authorities that Ming-Liang’s I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (Malaysia/Taiwan, 2006) portrays Kuala Lumpur in a bad light.

These films have then become a means to re-engage with the self in the way that Ella Shoha describes as ‘post-Third-Worldist’, where she refers to cinematic practice, mostly in Africa and the Middle-East, that “conveys a movement 'beyond' a specific ideology--Third-Worldist nationalism” more than a decade ago.[3] In this sense, these films are similar to their Sixth Generation counterpart in China instead of the Fifth, as they are more concerned with their own internal problems. These films pose a significant question of what it means for the people today in Southeast Asia as the whirlwind of nationalism swept the region after the Asian financial crisis as well as the US-led intervention of Iraq and the current financial crisis. It is an attempt to investigate the discourse of nationalism from the viewpoint of the Other, whether sexually, racially, geographically, and so on, as well as an attempt to move beyond a critique of the colonialism experienced by many countries in the region. While these sets of films are in no way to be seen as a single entity, as indeed the region itself is not, with its diversity ranging from religion and politics to culture, they nevertheless point to the same desire to re-imagine what has been lost in the memory of the past and its absence in the physicality and visuality of the present time.



2

Mekong Delta/Day

The stunning image of the flooded landscape of Ca-Mau, the last frontier at the Southern tip of Vietnam, where the lowland meets the sea. The camera follows the undercurrent with images of various life forms.

Voiceover:
“I have always lived in Ca Mau, with the dry and flooding seasons. From the time before independence, I only remember the flooding seasons. The water would cover the land, rotting everything: the grass and the houses, the buffaloes and the men.”

(The opening scene of Buffalo Boy, directed by Ming Nguyen-Vo)

We are taken into an unknown world by the images before us: the Mekong Delta, the land where water permeates all forms of life in Nguyen-Vo’s Buffalo Boy (2004); the deep tropical forest where monkeys talk and phantom tigers live in Weerasethakul’s Tropical Malady (2004); a series of hospital dreamscapes in Syndromes and a Century; an ever-foggy Kuala Lumpur in Ming-Liang’s I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone; or an operatic rural landscape of Indonesia in Gurin Nugroho Riyanto’s Opera Jawa (2006).

We are transposed to a different time and place, to a primitive desire where the boundaries between life and death, man and beast, real and imagined, past and present, present and future, and so on, are blurred. Though the elements of exoticism and primitivism are still in place, as I suggested above, for me these unknown worlds, coupled with the slow pacing and the still quality of the images, as well as other elements such as the repetitive sounds, are a step beyond an exoticised visuality and a move into what I call a ‘contemplative space’. It is a space that needs to be defined and escapes an easy explanation. It is a meaning that needs to move away from the discursive West-East binary. The process of finding such meaning will then reveal the complex exchange between the local and the Western, where these images aim to dazzle as well as the process of reinvestigating the self. As Chow suggests, ‘the production of images is the production not of things but of relations, not of one culture but of value between cultures’.[4] These spaces remind us of the limits of our understanding if we attempt to understand them from either point of view, the Asian self or the West.

In a way, this ‘contemplative space’ is similar to the one Weerasethakul invites us into, the unknown journey of the purely visual of non-knowledge, where we stare into the darkness in the middle of two parts of his film Tropical Malady.[5] It is a kind of void that inhabits the in-betweenness employed both structurally and thematically in Weerasethakul's films, from city to jungle, from past to present, from darkness to light, and so on, where we are forced to look into and fill in the gap of the in-between. It is a point of clash between primitive past and modernised future, colonial past and capitalist future, that we can see in one clear motion of the present, crystallised in the fume floating up towards the end of Syndromes and a Century.

Weerasethakul’s latest film, Syndromes and a Century, continues his two-part structure in the exploration of the memories of his parents’ love stories before they met. Without obvious narratives, the film builds around memories and emotions in two hospital settings, marked by temporal and geographical differences, one in the past and the other in the present, one in the countryside and the other in the big city of Bangkok. In the two parts of the film, played by the same characters as in Tropical Malady, the audience is encouraged to fill in the void and move beyond the seemingly binary structure. But instead of leading us to the unknown space by darkness, as in Tropical Malady, Syndromes and a Century leads us towards it by light, either the natural light in the first part or the artificial one in the second half, which brings about ‘visibility’ and a possibility of ‘knowledge’, as the Thai name Sang Sattawat or ‘light of the century’ suggests. Moreover, in the same way as Tropical Malady tests our limits of perception in relation to knowledge, the light of Syndromes and a Century also makes us question what is beyond our field of vision and knowledge.

While the first part of the film revolves around the hospital in the countryside, where the story is infused with a sense of the mythical and folktales, the second part focuses on the modernized hospital where the audience is introduced to the lingering image of the statue of His Royal Highness Prince Mahidol of Songkla (the present King’s father), known as the "Father of Modern Medicine". For Michel Foucault, in his attempt to examine the state of modern power and power relations embedded in institutions, the hospital is no different to a prison, school, factory or similar institution, where behaviours are shaped and internalized by each individual through a set of norms and regulations.[6] Likewise, the hospital Weerasethakul portrays in the second part can be seen as an embodiment of Western modern knowledge that attempts to regulate and influence contemporary life. It is fitting that this film was commissioned by New Crowned Hope to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth, an artist whose works have given light through his music from Europe and influenced the rest of the world, from one light of the century to the one in the present in Syndromes and a Century.

However, the hospital here is not presented as a proud legacy of Western enlightenment but is instead filled with images of a drunken doctor, a rather hellish basement, a dentist singing to his patient, a room full of disabled people with artificial legs, etc, coupled with mythical and supernatural tales in the first part. Weerasethakul has constructed a kind of space beyond the discursive practice of modern medicine, a void where the clash is taking place. These images are not simply a criticism of medical practice, as they are made out to be by the Thai censorship authorities, which include a member from the medical board, but is more or less a question he poses to our perception and knowledge of the hospital and its practice as a prime example of Western power/knowledge.

Weerasethakul does not settle for an easy interpretation but keeps us floating and dreaming of possibilities, like an ethereal soul on a journey from one life to another to find meanings. Towards the end of the film, the camera slowly follows the fume being sucked towards the dark tunnel of a pipeline, a kind of black hole in the hospital basement, resonant of the darkness of a total solar eclipse. It is a space where light is totally omitted. It is both the beginning and the end of all things. Nothing exists beyond this point. Weerasethakul comes close to leading us to nirvana, the ultimate aim of Buddhism, to reach the ineffable state of extinction from all desires and attachments.

The image of the Mekong Delta, described above, in one of the few films made by a Vietnamese director, Buffalo Boy, the last frontier between land and water, a place for the living and the dead, is a space that is a testament to the past, present and to the things to come in the future.[7] Through the age-old cycle of dry and flooding seasons, it has become a kind of anthropological site where every layer underneath is unearthed and reveals its history. The floodwater, according to Nguyen-Vo, is “a metaphor for the passing of real time in underwater decay, and of historical time in wars and colonization”. It is a source of both death and life. In Buffalo Boy, the forces of nature remind us once again of how they remain indifferent to human struggle, in the life of farmers, doctors and patients in two different places and times. There is a never-ending life cycle where one cannot find the point of beginning or ending, as in the last scene where the girl is told that she is holding her great-grandfather’s bones in her hand and the same voiceover, supposedly the father's voice, is attempting to explain: “Where should I start? With the dry season or the flooding season?” The dialogue between generations opens up and takes place in this last frontier. What was once lost is re-discovered and marked in the memories of those in the present.

In a country like Vietnam, with its history of colonization by the French, Japanese and Americans, the colonial past has just become a fleeting memory amidst the human struggle against the forces of nature and amongst themselves. The carcasses have piled up and gradually become part of the earth awaiting to be evacuated. They remain there as part of life, changing their form, eroding and decaying; nothing is permanent. It is like the soil in the Delta District which seems to be inscribed with a long-lost history, but as time goes by it becomes nothing more than fertile soil in which to grow vegetation for the life of different generations. In the post-Post-Third-Worldist cinema, it no longer makes sense to talk about Vietnam in colonial terms, nor to do so about India, the Philippines, Malaysia, and so on, where we tend to reduce the complexity of the representation, as I suggested earlier. It is also worth reminding ourselves of Chow’s suggestion to read the non-West in such a manner as to draw out its unconscious, irrational, and violent nuances, so that it can no longer simply be left in a blank, frozen and mythologised condition known perfunctorily as an “alternative” to the West.[8]



[1] Rey Chow, Primitive Passion: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995, p. 170-171.
[2] Zhang Yingjin, Ed. and introduction. China in a Polycentric World: Essays in Chinese Comparative Literature, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998, p. 118.
[3] Ella Shohat, "Framing Post-Third-Worldist Culture: Gender and Nation in Middle Eastern/North African Film." Jouvert: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Volume 1, Issue 1 (1997) <http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert/v1i1/shohat.htm>.
[4] Rey Chow, Primitive Passion: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995, p. 60.
[5] For further discussion of Tropical Malady see Sopawan Boonnimitra’s PhD thesis’s Lak-ka-pid-lak-ka-perd: Contemporary Urban Conditions with Special Reference to Thai Homosexuality.
[6] For further discussion see Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1977).
[7] Although Minh Nguyen-Vo migrated to America in his early years, Buffalo Boy is still one of a few films to be directed and mostly worked on by a Vietnamese crew.
[8] Rey Chow, Ethics After Idealism: Theory-Culture-Ethnicity-Reading, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998, p. xxi.

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Essay for Guangzhou Triennial 08

Many countries in South and Southeast Asia have at one time or another been colonised or influenced by European powers. It is inevitable, then, that when we talk of these countries, we often do so in the context of European powers and, particularly after the Second World War, the United States. Not only cultural influences but also the borders between the countries are products of a series of negotiations between European powers and the natives. These conflicts, from the formation of nation states to the Vietnam War and the current turmoil in Pakistan, and so on, are legacies of colonialism.

You might think that in a country like Thailand, where postcolonial discourse is not a priority, being the only country in Southeast Asia to escape colonialism from a European power, we have little awareness of its dénouement. Over the last few years, with the problems in southernmost Thailand and the daily acts of violence in the predominantly Muslim community, accused of the acts of separatists who want their own Muslim state, or the recent dispute between Thailand and Cambodia over the rights to the Hindu temple of Preah Vihear, the question of postcolonialism has come to the fore in the most concrete forms imaginable.
The long conflict between the two countries was sparked off again in 1962, when the World Court ruled that the temple belonged to Cambodia, using the French map as a reference and leaving the issue of surrounding areas unresolved, with a recent claim by Cambodia to the World Heritage Committee (UNESCO) for sole ownership of the Preah Vihear temple. The two sides are still arguing over whether to use the French or American map to determine the boundaries between the two countries. Neither side has been directly involved in producing these maps. In the early 20th century, due to their lack of map-making knowledge, they were merely observers in the process of mapping their territories. It is ironic that the issue over borders, having once been settled and mapped out by the colonial power, has resurfaced at a time when the call is for ‘Farewell to Postcolonialism’. Recent conflicts over the settlement of borders between China and Russia, and disputes over territories in many parts of the world, only serve to confirm that the reconsideration of history is needed. These are instances reminiscent of or left over from a colonial period that defines what we are as a nation and as individuals today. The lost world that we thought had been minutely rediscovered by the technology of mapping, has re-disappeared, so that we need to re-map the territory in every way, physically, culturally and mentally.
This proves that colonialism will never go out of fashion. In other places, or for other people, ‘Farewell to Postcolonialism’ has become an official ending to the heavy baggage that tied them to the discourse. It is more or less the same question of arriving at modernity, at enlightenment: there are many paths, many routes, and different times at which one understands or chooses to understand postcolonialism. I found this rather ambiguous statement of ‘Farewell to Postcolonialism’ quite problematic for Asia because of its diverse backgrounds, beliefs, cultures and intricate relationships with colonial powers. How do we begin to make sense of talking about postcolonialism in the midst of such diversity and varying relationships to the discourse? This is a question that we must also return to through the visual engagement in the last section, where I hope to sketch out some of the specificities.
Cold war and globalisation have changed the face of postcolonial discourse many times over through discourse on identity, hybridity, diaspora, multiculturalism, although we seem to look at the world through what is left over from the old world. It seems the colonised and coloniser only change their outward forms, as the gun turns into capital. In today’s situation it is rather naïve to confront the world with the colonial viewpoint, when the basic notions of nation and identity and its related issues are no longer the same. These are also two issues I would like to draw attention to. How could one discuss ‘identity’ beyond the framework of the socio-political and amidst rapidly changing borders? It has become a fluctuating entity that always escapes the authority/state’s desire to manage and control, when diversity and difference are no longer such challenging ideas to put across.
I would like to refer to one of the symposiums for the triennial, ‘Restarting from Asia’, as a starting point to look through and from the specific viewpoints of Asia, particularly South and Southeast Asia, to reflect on what is taking place in a global context around the issue of postcolonialism. The two regions have for decades been overshadowed by the continuing rise of East Asia, except for acts of violence reported across the global media, such as in East Timor, until its success in becoming a new state in 2002, or in the southernmost part of Thailand, or in Pakistan. The phrase ‘Restarting from Asia’ in many people’s minds undeniably means ‘ Restarting from China, Japan, Korea or Singapore’. Their economic and cultural domination, as in art domains where they have their own art biennales, have produced a double mission, not to say mission impossible, for many countries in Asia to begin to understand postcolonial discourse fully. The influence of China particularly, with its long history of domination in the regions, and that of Japan, which has been significant over the last century, has been indispensable to the regions’ development. Although without a proper deconstruction of the Western powers and their ways of thinking, it is already a common desire among some of the South and Southeast Asian countries to reinvent and reconstruct themselves in relation to Asian superpowers.
In Southeast Asia in particular, not only its boundaries but the various terminologies of the region itself have already acquired a postcolonial overtone.[i] Early names such as British India and French Indochina have suggested the political influence of European powers, while others have their origins in the cultural differences between the two biggest forces in Asia, India and China, which have long struggled for power over many areas. However, it also needs to be said that it is rather unfair to say that region has been totally culturally dominated by Europe, India or China, as most of the countries’ traditions are strongly rooted in their own cultures, as seen in their unique architecture and visual arts.
What is pertinent in today’s situation is to examine the complicated and delicate issues of postcolonialism through the particular contexts of South and Southeast Asia, and how the visual can help to expand and question our understanding of some of the inexplicable situations taking place nowadays; just as the visual standing of the Preah Vihear Temple reminds us today of the intricate relationship between colonised and coloniser, between God and people, between nationalism and capitalism, and so on.


2
Prior to the arrival of the colonising powers, mainland Southeast Asia had never had official national borders. Until then, boundaries had been signified by symbols instead of concrete border signs. The separation between kingdoms could be seen by natural symbols such as mountains, watersheds and forests, and sacred sites or temples built for spiritual gatherings.[ii] As many mountains are believed to house sacred spirits offering protection of the land and its people, the Preah Vihear Temple was built as a sanctuary on the Dong Rek range that used to separate Thailand and Cambodia. Its existence symbolized the attempt to blend old beliefs of people of different races who settled in adjacent areas; therefore the true meaning and significance of the temple is universal.[iii]
It was only just over a hundred years ago or so that the colonizing powers demarcated the borders, leading to the abolition of the old kingdoms. The nation and state were born without regard to history or cultural heritage. Different disciplines were established, and the two areas of archaeology and history of the arts were used to build the new nations. Southeast Asia as a whole was trapped into constructing their nation and identity through the colonial microscope.
This demarcation of borders then became an infernal machine waiting to explode. Borders taking no account of people or cultural differences have become an excuse for violence in the name of security and nationalism. Border wars seem unavoidable, as suggested by Donnan and Wilson: they have been ‘a long-standing if not necessary component to the processes of nation- and state-building in the post imperial age’.[iv] As they further suggest, the borders have become ‘sites and symbols of power’.[v] These symbols of power go far back to the colonial powers.
Intending to conquer, colonising powers began their search in every corner of the world, where every nook and cranny was marked into their maps. Map-making knowledge was limited to those superpowers, and it has continued to be so as the United Nations Security Council is still composed of five permanent superpowers – China, France, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom, and the United States – who stand to protect their interests in the former colonies and elsewhere. New superpowers such as China, Singapore and Japan are part of the committee managing heritage sites, waiting to get their hands on the temple for their own economic and cultural interests in the regions. The Preah Vihear Temple questions us again and again about that disappearing old world, as Cambodia recently lodged a complaint with the National Security Council against Thailand. Yet again, the new series of renegotiations will result in borders having to be redrawn.
Over time, the dynamic meanings of the Preah Vihear Temple have changed from those of sacred site to a symbol of nationalism and capitalism, where tourism has devalued what once was. As a result of the conflicts, the Preah Vihear Temple is no longer a Vihear or house of God. The God has disappeared, as has the site of Preah Vihear, becoming a void space into which no one is allowed while both sides continue to claim ownership. The solid space of Preah Vihear has evaporated into thin air, until it is once again rediscovered through a remapping of the territory.
It is this constant oscillation between discovering and recovering, between Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s deterritorialization and reterritorialization, between arriving and bidding farewell, that has opened up the moments of both crisis and possibility in the history of the regions. It is in these moments of crisis and possibility, of something in-between, that one needs to look closely, taking care not to walk into the minefield or time bomb of nationalism or racism waiting to explode. It is in these time warps or gaps of the in-between that, as in the arts, we produce something very interesting, where something fresh can result from the destructive moments. We need to see with clear head and mind that this is no longer an excuse for violence.


3
Yet, how then could we bid farewell to that which has always been part of us? The departing moment itself is already an act of violence. This territorial mapping, as I have suggested, is not only physical but also psychological, as people re-identify themselves through the process. How do we know who we are when our knowledge of history and nation is unsettled and renegotiated? Julia Kristeva’s (1982) understanding of ‘abject’ may provide an extreme understanding of the tension between borders. In a personal sense, it marks the departing moment when we begin to recognise a boundary between ‘I’ and ‘not-I’, me and (m)other, self and other. The subject wants to repel the other but is powerless to do so. This otherness is ‘radically excluded’ but always a presence. It produces a moment of rupture into being, into making meaning. These attempts to separate the two, what is ‘self’ and ‘other’, or expel the abject, as suggested by David Sibly, creates a feeling of anxiety because such separations can never be finally achieved.6 The attitude towards the other is then often related to the abject, the unwanted but necessary part of who we are, which to a certain extent causes ‘ambivalent sensations of desire and disgust’,[vi] key to our understanding of the social practice of inclusion and exclusion, whether for the nation or the self.
The colonial ramification, in a way, has stood as a rupture of the coherent identity and dominant order, in the same way as capitalism has left and still creates a mark that produces sporadic moments of rupture in society. How could we then renegotiate with the other to produce a new territory of physical and psychological terrain? While borders are theoretically unsettled through the movements of people, capital and technology, it is doubtful that we could escape a world situation filled with hatred. We may have a better awareness through much writing in past decades as to how to deal with xenophobia, and at least recognise that otherness is part of the self, but without an understanding of the roots and specificity of that generalised other, this would just remain in the pages of books. Sibly (1995) urges us to engage with people, to listen to them. In a similar manner, Sarat Maharaj encourages us to engage with ‘difference and the unknown’ in both ‘artistic’ and ‘social political’ terms.[vii] Without direct dialogue, the otherness would still remain the ‘unwanted’ that is always a threat to the construction of the self, or as Kristeva puts it, as ‘the ego threatened by the non-ego, society threatened by its outside, life by death’.[viii]
It is only fifty years ago or so that ‘nationalism’ brought us the unity of freedom within the region, without foreign domination further dividing our common values in an already diverse region of different religions and cultures, through borders decided by the outsider. It is a conflict deeply embedded in our history, and as seen in the Preah Vihear Temple case, one finds similarities in the current situation. It is this initial quest of attempting to understand what ‘Farewell to Postcolonialism’ means in South and Southeast Asia that I find in the spirit of the works by artists from the regions, hoping to offer alternative views of the situation and further expand the views on ‘identity’ and ‘nation’, ‘self’ and ‘us’, and perhaps unpack our complex context and new situation under the economic influence of China, Singapore, Japan and the new superpowers in the current world order. Fifty years on, many countries in South and Southeast Asia are still dreaming of the reconstruction of their identity, both individual and regional, fuelled by internal conflicts and clashes between religious groups, political agendas, state and citizens, and so on. I will leave some further questions to ponder while we attempt to go beyond what is seen and visible in the images:
How could we really engage in a dialogue that goes beyond the theoretical mode and into the social realm? How could we erase the borders and memories of colonialism past and present and go beyond the old world views while its residues remain in place through the new structures of power? How could we re-invent and re-imagine ourselves in these two regions in ways that will not end in the trap of right-wing nationalist politics? How can the state offer a different mode of ideology that provides an equal paradigm among the people? How could the arts offer other modes of thinking and looking into the current situation? Can it tempt us into getting our hands dirty and become directly involved in the social realm?


4
At first glance, Huma Mulji’s image of the camel in the trunk seems to face you with yet another exotic Other, using the traditional technique of taxidermy. For those who understand the context, her work can be intimidating. She uses the process of low-tech taxidermy, a skill used to treat skins of dead animals in the Lahore Zoo. Her recent work Arabian Delight, a focus of controversy at Art Dubai in March 2008, features a camel which has undergone taxidermy being squashed inside a large suitcase. The view among Arabs is that her representation of a camel, a national animal and symbol of pride in the Arab world, is an insult. The government therefore ordered it to be removed on the second day of the show. The work can also be seen as a reference to the smuggling of camel jockeys, which has become a constant problem, particularly in the United Arab Emirates, where in 1999 an 8-year-old Pakistani boy was kidnapped to work as a jockey in camel races. There continue to be reports of hundreds of young boys from South Asia who are used and sometimes smuggled across borders to become camel jockeys.[ix]
For me, this work sums up what is currently the most important aspect of postcolonialism. It is not a question of how one could unpack luggage with a camel inside, which can then carry the luggage somewhere: it is a question of how one could possibly pack and fit the camel in the luggage in the first place. How could we pack it in and expect things to stay the same by preserving it? I’m particularly interested in unpacking the way in which we attempt to pack meaning into some kind of container and try to seal it: something always spills over. It is important to start to criticize things from within, how we can develop the ability to notice what shapes our thinking, experience and memory. In other words, how we could begin to see what has always been there but we have never noticed. We can never understand what happens in Pakistan through the CNN or BBC news. We are always the outsider looking in.
Mulji’s new work, proposed for Guangzhou, attempts to give us an inside look into the current situation through the familiar scene of the street performance deeply rooted in Asian tradition. In the context of Pakistan today, Huma situates her works in, as she clearly puts it, “the rise of right-wing sentiments in Pakistan, a move towards an ‘Islamic’ as opposed to a ‘South Asian’ identity”. In the midst of the country’s search for its identity, her new work takes us through the moment, you could say, when hell breaks loose: the moment when the laughter of the street performance turns into tragedy.
Following on from the context of Arabian Night, she goes a step further by attempting to stage a full-scale event inspired by street performances, through sculptural installations, by using taxidermy animals, and particularly monkeys, often used in street performances, in her work entitled The Performers: Raju, Michael, Sanjay. Although in her works she uses the most traditional and primitive elements, such as camels, folk tales and street performance, as well as her technique of taxidermy, they become a compelling critique of the present climate, whether global trading in her last piece or the global economy as a scene of violence in this piece.
The Performers: Raju, Michael, Sanjay also points to the roots of violence in tradition itself, camouflaged as a form of entertainment. The monkeys are taken out of their natural environments and trained, as if they were human beings, to perform ridiculous tasks. These monkeys stand as a mark of abjection, reminding us of the moment of separation from our animal being, between culture and what preceded it. What will happen when that boundary is transgressed? That otherness invites us into its world, saluting us, mocking us, mirroring us, and in a way becoming us in the same way that we become them once that boundary is shattered. The absurd quality of the work may allow us forget the seriousness of the violence for a short while, but before long we are in that dark place where we realise that the nature of violence is part of us all.
Through her use of the most stereotypical and traditional materials within the region, Mulji constantly suggests the huge gap between the traditional and the global context. There is always the gap that forces violent change in one or other context. The gap may result from physical size or spatial conflict, as it is either the camel or the suitcase that needs to be altered. The new work The Performer suggests to us that the gap is also evidently in time. The street performance, the tradition left over from the old world, once transposed to the present has created a gap, a lapse of time, where the performers themselves could only be confused, malfunction or lapse into the primitive past. In this haziness, the violence is no longer local but has gone on to the international stage that she attempts to reflect.
While Mulji’s works take us to the heart of the conflict, those of her contemporary Hamra Abbas are a direct critique of the traditional male-dominated Muslim society. As in her previous works, Please Do Not Step 1& 2 suggest the difficulty of finding a place for female individuality in the Muslim world as well as being a Muslim in the larger society. Her new works in the Love series are a blunt and powerful commentary on sexual politics: that it may only be within the realm of the arts that women can launch such criticism. Her last piece in the series, recently featured at the Istanbul Biennale, is the sculpture based on the Kama Sutra called Lessons in Love, with the sculptures of the Kama Sutra armed with rifles.
Continuing with the Love series, her new work for the Guangzhou Triennial, Love Yourself, is a sound/movement installation consisting of toy-like fighter jets resembling ‘dildos’. While Lessons in Love and Love Yourself both address the myth of masculinity, the former is rooted in tradition and the latter explores the military domain. The images of fighter jets occupying the sky in a way emphasise the forceful power of masculinity, suggesting both destruction and desire.
The fact that these fighter jets are manufactured in China, in the same way as Mulji’s cheap mechanical monkeys could also have been made in China, reminds us of all the commodities, from cheap toys to advanced innovations, made on Chinese soil nowadays. Even the most traditional and local artefacts can be produced and distributed globally through China, as most countries’ souvenirs are. The displacement of production also raises the question of identity and place in relation to the changing geography of world economics that informs these two works. The globalisation of the economy has further complicated the already complex history of Asia, extending also to the intimate life of the individual, as suggested by Archana Hande’s works.
Hande’s Arrange Your Own Marriage is another mutation of complex traditions in the virtual world. Her installation with various objects that are supposedly tokens of celebration reminds us of secret imaginary pink stores where you can get everything you desire and possibly find true love. It is the little girl’s dream, only to find out one day that it cannot become reality in the present conditions of society. The caste system, sexual discrimination and age-old customs are still in place and so ingrained within the society that without looking beneath the surface through the microscope, one cannot find any mutation in such strict traditions. She looks under the microscope at such delicate matters as love and purity of blood, where even the most idealised notions can find ways to mutate. The marriage between the two different worlds, tradition and virtual reality, East and West, man and woman, is to be re-imagined through the short-lived, convenient, packaged ceremony, much like India itself is looking for a fast lane to a successful marriage to capitalism.
My own interest in the issue of gender and sexuality has attracted me to these works by female artists who often create a stir in their own cultures, and to how they project alternative ways of looking into traditions and the construction of the postcolonial world. By mapping out South Asia from a female perspective, we could begin to unpack the many layers of postcolonial discourse that these artists set out for us, which are often obscured by gender.


5
Only ten years ago or so, Ackbar Abbas observed that the unique cultural position of Hong Kong as a ‘culture of disappearance’, as well as its relationship with China as ‘quasi-colonialism’, in a way suggested the disruption of the equation of colonised/coloniser.[x] While the concept may have been appropriate for its time, a decade later Hong Kong still retains its unique position in Asia, if not in the world, in a continuing search for its own identity. However, the disappearance discussed by Abbas was intensely felt in the aftermath of the Handover in 1997, with many communities actually disappearing for different reasons. Sham Shui Po, previously the hub of commercial and industrial activity, was the worst affected as many factories closed down to take advantage of cheaper labour forces in China, and is now under a government urban renewal project. Bundith Phunsombatlert, a Thai artist, traces his Hakkien roots during his residential programme in Hong Kong, through the father of a Thai friend who lives in Sham Shui Po, only to find many of the residents have dispersed around the globe as a result of the effects on the local economy. In Sham Shu Po: Retelling the Stories from the Past, he tries to piece together the story of Sham Shui Po through a string of interviews with the residents, which could never be completed as many of them left the area.
The book has been symbolically used in his previous work, Bangkok: the Story of a City (2005), to represent the discourse on Bangkok through the virtual contested space of history, cultures, social issues, and so on. He brought together the books on Bangkok in the central library to make a virtual replica of a bookshelf that turns books into a brick game. Bangkok becomes a constantly changing narrative through time and the dynamic of different players. In the same way, Sham Shui Po is a changing narrative with different narrators through time. His work becomes not merely a record but a testament to that changing narrative as well as the changing geography.
He has mapped out the kind of geography where, as Doreen Massey argues in relation to another metropolis, the city of London, ‘places do not lend themselves to having lines drawn around them’ and that there is a ‘vast geography of dependencies, relations and effects that spreads out from here around the globe.’ [xi] She reminds us that it is necessary to follow the lines of its engagement elsewhere. [xii] The cultures or identities are no longer local but extend beyond geographical boundaries. Phunsombatlert’s record of the memories of the people living in Sham Shui Po cuts across time and space, in turn creating a new geography of space. His work renegotiates physical and imaginary boundaries, which fuse together and depend on each other. It suggests to us that border changes through the movement and displacement of people do not always follow established geographical borders. People are constantly changing the geography, not the other way around.
The collaboration between different generations – he himself included – despite geographical and temporal distance, is somehow a kind of reunion that produces different meanings to each participant. While older residents of Sham Shui Po can reunite with old pals from the band through playing Beatles songs and are thus able to re-live the memories of the past, for the younger generation of students the reunion with the past comes in the form of lessons that are reiterated but not fully understood. For Phunsombatlert, the reunion fulfils his wish of going back to his Chinese roots. In this meeting of generations through different forms of mediation – text, music, dialogue – the narratives retell our history, identity and culture in a constant dynamic. But the reunion, as Phunsombatlert reminds us, is only possible through the imagination and the virtual.
His presentation is in the form of a book and animation, painstakingly reconstructed, and stories are told and retold many times over through memory and reiteration. His handmade animation is in a way a dedication to his roots, his ancestry in the Chinese diaspora, growing up in Thailand where the Chinese has long been part of Thainess. At the same time, these handmade animations, a tracing of figures as a representation of real people and events, only confirm to us yet again the impossibility of fully mapping out history. The present is suddenly turned into history as time passes by, leaving only a trace or mark that cannot be not fully discovered. What is possible is to create a new mapping that traces across different times and spaces.
Another related work, by Josephine Starrs & Leon Cmielewski, Great Wall of China in Australia, looks back two hundred years or so at the oldest Aboriginal archeological site, Lake Mungo, where Chinese workers helped to build the sheep station and called the crescent-shaped dune in the area ‘Walls of China’. Once again, the question raised by Chris Berry when the former Prime Minister Paul Keating said in 1993 that ‘Australia is a multicultural nation in Asia’ resounds in the present context.[xiii] However, Prime Minister John Howard’s announcement, a decade later in the post-9/11 year 2003, perhaps did not go down so well with the Asian neighbours when he said that Australia would launch pre-emptive strikes against terrorists, wherever they were.[xiv]
Beyond the political agenda, Starrs and Cmielewski have reversed the notion: that in the same way we could say ‘Asia in Australia’ through the existence of ‘Walls of China’. By its appearance, it would be unthinkable to relate the landscape to China. But the Chinese immigrants have long been part of Australia’s history and landscape. Through the multi-media installation, the images of desert landscapes at night and Lake Mungo during the day are projected on two sided video screen. Through the movement of the audiences, different whispering voices are triggered. The history is reconstructed through a stream of whispering voices, reciting such details as the names of Chinese immigrants to Australia during the 1800s. The long-lost voices of history, the other that is part of Australia, are to be reawakened through the audience’s movement, triggering the re-emergence of the invisible landscape.


6
The personal struggle, both physical and mental, has become part of the postcolonial terrain in Asia as the embodiment of Mahatma Gandhi’s approach of non-violence. Human struggle in a world filled with conflicts and wars is at the heart of Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s works. He is one of a new generation of Vietnamese artists born or raised abroad, whose works concern its history and identity under the influence of different powers, as well as reflecting an attempt to catch up with the rapid changes taking place today. Vietnam is still a country in search of its identity, attempting to escape the war-torn image painted across the globe. It is a country well-known for images of refugees, still fresh in people’s minds across the globe. It is this particular issue of history and refugees that is constantly explored in Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s works.
His work-in-progress, Breathing is Free: 12,756.3, is also a reflection of what happened beyond the borders of Vietnam, as we witness the Chinese immigrants found dead in a truck at Dover, and more recently Burmese immigrants found dead inside a seafood container van in southern Thailand. The artist aims to run 12,756.3 km., a distance equivalent to the diameter of the earth. Running, for him, is both physically and symbolically part of the refugees’ life and human existence as a whole. It is an attempt to represent human struggle against any form of prejudice and injustice in the place called Earth. It is also the best statement he could give to the public of his personal view of the suffering of his nation. In a way, his running also becomes a form of meditation through repetitive foot movements. It is a meditation of the suffering. It is a struggle within the self to be free not only from physical suffering but also from the mind. He runs to cover a distance starting from the narrowest part of the Earth’s hemisphere, but too far away for any human to reach, to fathom out the real differences of the people inhabiting the same Earth. Through his graphics, created from carefully designed routes from air mapping, Jun gives us hope that maybe through the advanced technology of GPS, human determination can conquer all injustice and give voice to the other.
Physical and mental struggle is also featured in The Ground, the Root, and the Air: The Passing of the Bodhi Tree (2004-2007), which he filmed in Laos. The three-part film symbolically uses a stadium, lanterns, the Mekong River and the Bodhi Tree to comment on the fast-paced development of a country where people are struggling to achieve success and striving for something to hold on to. It is a situation common elsewhere, particularly in Laos, with the high tide of capitalism forcing its way into the region, influenced by neighbouring countries like Thailand, Myanmar and Cambodia, who have close relations with China. It will be difficult to swim against the tide, and a strong will and physical preparation are needed.
The Bodhi Tree, under which Buddha achieved enlightenment, is seen here as symbolic of Buddhist wisdom. The Mekong River is seen as a unifying artery within mainland Southeast Asia, including Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Myanmar, and runs to China’s Yunnan. But such integration is dampened by politics and the unequal development within the area. It is Buddhism that truly reunites the differences along the two sides of the river. The Bodhi Tree stands tall on the bank of the river and it takes not only physical but mental strength to recognise its value, which could take us away from the race of capitalism and allow us to swim against the tide.
Both Breathing is Free: 12,756.3 and The Ground, the Root, and the Air: The Passing of the Bodhi Tree, as well as his Memory Project, gives hope to the individual determined to achieve something greater. It only takes a single person to change or make a better world, and he himself shows us this possibility through a man running across the world, or the effort of struggling underwater with a cyclo. Although it could be seen as an aimless struggle by those with no awareness of the wisdom of Buddhism, with life perceived as a never-ending circle, it is in the simple acts of meditation through things such as breathing and running that one can find piece of mind.
In much the same way, physical and mental struggle is part of Kai Syng Tan’s Making a Living of Sorts in (Y)our Theme Park: Here/There/Where. As a Singaporean artist, Syng Tan occupies an interesting position in critiquing the postcolonial in a relatively young country where economic success supersedes the other aspects of life. While Singapore’s economic influence is at once much criticized as well as a model within the region, with its own state companies spreading across the region, its recent cultural phenomena are more welcome. She takes a poetic outlook on postcolonialism, the state of being in between conscious and subconscious while submerged in the water. With the artist in her liminal state, it is up to the audience to judge her position as that of winner or loser in the struggle to survive.


7
While China, Japan, Korea, Singapore and recently India take centre stage in every possible way, the majority of South and Southeast Asian countries are nearly invisible in the world order. Apart from US influence in the region, ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) needs to carefully balance the power play with China to maintain its position on the world map.[xv] It is in the cultural realm that the assertion of their identities could be seen as individual. Filmic representation and the arts have become the focus of their identities and cultural exploration. Through them, we see different layers of complexities and that which has been invisible to our eyes. These visibilities of images, as Deleuze writes, ‘are not defined by sight but are complexes of actions and passions, actions and reactions, multisensorial complexes which emerge into the light of day.’[xvi] Rey Chow, following Deleuze’s logic of visibility, offers a further view of the condition of visibility as rather a complicated one that ‘would need to involve a consideration of the less immediately or sensorially detectable elements helping to propel, enhance, or obstruct such visibility in the first place and, even where visibility has occurred, a consideration of the often vacillating relations between the visible and the invisible that may well continue at different levels’.[xvii]
It is precisely on this foundation and with such awareness that we should look at images or what is visible. Through some of the moving and still images featured in East-South, Out of Sight, as well as a selection of films from Southeast Asia that have been banned or censored in their own countries, some of these implications are being explored through different issues. What has been our short-sightedness in everyday life or has been overshadowed by the states is to be discovered and seen through such a microscope. There is always something ‘out of sight’ preventing us from seeing the whole picture. It is between what is seen and unseen, the official and the alternative, the serious and the playful, the extraordinary and the ordinary, reality and imagination, and so on that we could understand the mechanisms at work in the society. Some of the works are discussed below.
Linda Saphan’s Incognito is a series of images of Cambodian women, that through ink drawings on rice paper gives an honest picture of the fragility of the Cambodian identity amidst the changing phases of a deeply traumatised nation. On the one hand, Cambodian women through many layers of fashionable clothes, instead of veils, hiding their true identity from visibility, similar to the mystical figure of the Oriental woman. On the other, they stand for freedom. The layering of clothes works as a masquerade that allows them to gaze back freely under the strict control of the government. The fragility and impermanence of rice paper confirms the ever-changing nature of the cultural codes as once understood in the colonial context.
In a similar manner, Nadiah Bamadhaj, a Malaysian artist, imposes her body upon the map of Putrajaya, the Malaysian new federal administrative complex, predominantly Arabic in style despite being a multi-ethnic country. Surveillance Series looks at Malaysia’s racialised political and economic system through architecture. The map here also changes its meaning through the female body. Through another cultural code whose implications have been changing over and over again, Memory of the Last Supper, a series of photographic works by myself, explores the in-between conditions of immigrants displacing and resettling into the new country. Their memory of the last supper is at once a banal and significant moment in their life. The images capture the in-between moments of uncertainty and anxiety, both physically and mentally: departure and arrival, here and there, past and present, and so on.
Kristoffer Ardena’s Hapunan plays with a stereotypical culture icon of the East: food. An invitation to a party to eat Filipino food turns into a stage play in which the partygoers unwittingly take part, only to find that instead of the promised Filipino food they are offered a variety of other Asian cuisines. Food is not much different from national costume or other cultural icons these days. It is a readymade package that allows one to access the exotic land. We have created a national myth through food, which has us believe we can gain access to other cultures through it. In the playful works of Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Pisut Ponnimit, Sarnath Banerjee, Yason Banal, Tintin Wulia, Sutthirat Supaparinya, postcolonialism is seen through city graffiti, animation, graphic novel, kitsch video, wedding ceremony and dialogue/online chatting, respectively. Most of these artists are part of the new generation born and raised in the postcolonial/digital era. Unburdened by any direct baggage, they make use of postmodern aesthetics to deconstruct the old frameworks of postcolonialism, and we need to pay serious attention despite their playfulness.


8
Chow responds to the recent Western European and North American fascination with East Asian cinema by asking: ‘should we try to direct such fascination back at some authentic, continuous Asianness lying beyond the alluring cinematic images, or would it not be more pertinent to see Asianness itself as a commodified and reproducible value, made tantalizing, visible and accessible not only by the filmic genres of the action or martial arts comedy, the love story, and the historical saga but also by an entire network of contemporary media discourses – economic rivalry, exotic cuisine, herbal medicine, spiritual and physical exercise, sex trade, female child adoption, model minority politics, illegal immigration, and so on – that are at once sustained by and contributing to the flows of capital?’[xviii] It is a legitimate comment that works on many levels across the general interest in both images and culture from Asia as a whole and in the artists’ works discussed here.
The above suggestion reminds us to look at these images also as part of a global context, whether in arts or elsewhere. We need to look at them both from the outside and listen more to the voices within. They provide a space to rethink some of the issues that have been discussed earlier and beyond. These works are among many more, diverse in mediums, approaches and subject matter, proving that postcolonialism is not single entity but goes beyond geographical boundaries. They create maps upon maps, despite military borders or nation boundaries, allowing us to create our own maps, our own terrains, constantly redrawn in the midst of change, forever in the dynamic process of deterritorialization and reterritorialization at work in every domain in one way or another. In such circumstances, there is an urgent need to constantly re-engage with the others. There are many ways to do so, as explored in some of the works, by making the others a familiar and desirable, by learning from each other, or even by concentrating on the simple acts of breathing to learn to listen to others.
While we speak of the realm of representation inside the museum, the reality outside has recently focused on a significant symbolic form: the Olympic Torch. The Olympic Torch, a symbol of peace and unity from the Western point of view, puts into question whether it can still legitimately represent that unity. Through everyday visuals, it reminds us of the significance of visual representation that has forced its way into our current debates, as the Preah Vihear Temple has recently demonstrated. It is a call for us to further engage in the visual realm by thinking through the arts and beyond. So, saying farewell to postcolonialism is not so much a moment of departure as a moment that opens up possibilities of engagement and the opportunity to thoroughly look into ourselves until we meet again.





[i] The name itself has changed over time according to different relationships with superpowers. The more modern term ‘Southeast Asia’ only came into use after the Second World War, having been geographically and strategically marked out by Western powers during the Cold War. (D.G.E. Hall, A History of South-East Asia, London: Macmillan, 1955, p. 3.) At the end of the Cold War, the name was still evolving and changing from a military/political purpose to an economic one, as evidenced by various groupings serving different economic purposes, such as the Mekong Sub-region, or ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations).
[ii] Srisak Wallipodom, http://www.muangboranjournal.com/.
[iii] Dhida Saraya, Preah Vihear: Sri Sikharesvara, Bangkok: Muang Boran Publishing House, 1994, p. 15.
[iv] Hastings Donnan & Thomas M. Wilson, Borders: Frontiers of Identity, Nation and State, Oxford: Berg, 1999, p. 3.
[v] ibid., p. 1
6 David Sibley, Geographies of Exclusion, London: Routledge, 1995, p. 8.
7 ibid., p. 11.
8 Sarat Maharaj, ‘Unfinished Sketch of an Unknown Object in 4D: Scenes of Art Research’ in Lak-ka-pid-lak-ka-perd: the Bangkok Invisible Landscapes Catalogue, 2005.
9 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, New York: Columbia University Press, 1982, p. 71.
10 http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2000/nea/824.htm
11Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, p. 4.
12 Doreen Massey, World City, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007, p. 13.
13 ibid., p. 13.
14 Chris Berry, A Bit on the Side: East-West Topographies of Desire, Rose Bay: EmPress Publishing, 1994, p. 21.
15 www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/natint/stories/s880036.htm.
16 ASEAN is a geographical and economic organization in Southeast Asia. The members include Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Indonesia, Brunei, Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar, and Cambodia. The organization is based on economic interests but its existence also extends to maintaining peace within the region, with its strong principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of each member.
17 Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (trans. Sean Hand), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1988, p. 59.
18 Rey Chow, Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films, New York: Columbia University Press, 2007, p. 12.
19 ibid., p. 12.

Guangzhou Triennial 08



Guangdong Museum of Art (venue for the 3rd Guangzhou Triennial 2008)
My work is a research curator (responsible for South&Southeast Asian artists) as well as an aritst in East-South: Out of Sight Project (co-curated by Viraporn Kittikunkamjorn) as part of Tea Pavilion (curated by Dorothee Albrecht).



Bundith Phunsombatlert



Kai Syng-Tan






Archana Hande's Arrange Your Own Marriage

























Huma Mulji's Double Salute (2008) for GT






Jitish Kallat

Talkin' Lound & Sayin' Something at Goteborg Museum of Art





















The group exhibition Talkin’ Loud and Saying Something! focuses on the positively controversial and challenging theme of visual artist research. This event is the first comprehensive contemporary art show that deliberately and openly seeks to combine artistic expression with research means and methods, and which also aims at effecting a productive and thought-provoking collision. The exhibition consists of four artistic research projects in and through each particular practice. The participating artists represent a wide variety of artistic strategies and have also worked coherently and consistently with research aims and methods.Of the participating artists, Sopawan Boonnimitra (film maker, film activist and researcher at Chulalongkorn university, Bangkok) was among the first three to be awarded a PhD in Art from the University of Lund in 2006. Jacqueline Donachie, who graduated from the Glasgow School of Art in the early 1990’s has spent 5 years working with a Professor of Human Genetics from the University of Glasgow, mapping a story of how certain genetic diseases worsen from generation to generation. Heli Rekula, one of Finland's most distinguished photographic artists, is currently doing her PhD project at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, and Annica Karlsson Rixon, one of Sweden's most interesting photo- based artists of the last decade, is currently part of the PhD program at the School of Photography at the Faculty of Fine, Applied and Performing Arts at the University of Gothenburg. She is working on this project with Anna Viola Hallberg, artist with an MA in International Museum Studies from the University of Gothenburg. The catalogue, which consists of a programmatic essay by curator Prof. Mika Hannula, individual statements made by the artists/researchers, and important visual documentation, will also constitute the basic material for the deliberations of this symposium.At the Gothenborg Centre for Contemporary Art (Konsthall), which is situated next to the Göteborg Museum of Art, there will be another exhibition on artistic research produced as an independent curatorial project. The diverging perspectives of these two exhibitions will certainly enliven the conference symposium Talking loud and saying something?







My Essay for Talkin' Loud:


The Time Storage
Sopawan Boonnimitra
August, 2008

1

The cinema (like photography) has a privileged relation to time, preserving the moment at which the image is registered, inscribing an unprecedented reality into its representation of the past. This, as it were, storage function may be compared to the memory left in the unconscious by an incident lost to consciousness. Both have the attributes of the indexical sign, the mark of trauma or the mark of light, and both need to be deciphered retrospectively across delayed time.
Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image, 2006, p. 9.

Unlike space, where one can see physical or material boundaries, time is in constant movement and abstraction. Photography enables us to freeze time, and its stillness becomes an index of the past time. The cinematic image provides an index where time moves from one point to another and the ability to constantly move back and forth in time. Through the digital media particularly, where time can be stopped, rewound or fast-forwarded, as well as technology such as close-circuit television or the internet, we come to experience time in the most non-linear way, and it also alters our experience of seeing both photograph and cinematic image. We experience what could be called ‘delayed time’, and cinema perhaps best demonstrates that experience as Mulvey suggests on the idea of ‘delayed cinema’, that in one aspect, referring to “the delay in time during which some detail has lain dormant, as it were, waiting to be noticed”.[i]

In a similar manner, Gilles Deleuze’s (1989) idea of ‘time-image’ offers us a way to see movements as subordinated to time. Time-image, according to Deleuze, is where the aberrant movement does not take place in a unified time-space but in direct images of time where the aberrant movement becomes the norm, which may cause many undecidable moments that cannot easily be identified or understood.[ii] Following Deleuze’s ‘time-image’, Daniel Frampton further suggests that “the time image, in its ‘aberration of movement’, is not of our perception or thought being a furtherance or parallel thinking. This suspension of the world gives the visible to thought in that it replaces our regular vision (thought) of the world with a different view.”[iii]

It is through these lines of thought that Memory of the Last Supper and The Missing Trilogy are to be viewed, comprehended, and experienced. It is in the moment that has been opened up through ‘time-image’ or ‘delayed cinema’ that we begin to see the construction of home in its ‘temporality’ instead of ‘spatiality’. It is also in this moment where the ‘indexical sign, the mark of trauma’ or the ‘mark of light’ in film and photography, as Mulvey suggests, could arrive at some kind of meaning. They are moments of in-between states that are yet unsettled, where one could re-imagine an identity and a home. In such a moment, the notion of ‘home’ is no longer a static point of reference in time and space for the identity to be mapped out, but it is when the notion of ‘home’ could be understood through what I suggest as lak-ka-pid-lak-ka-perd (sometimes closed-sometimes open). Through Memory of the Last Supper and The Missing Trilogy, the notion of home that is unsettled through space, and particularly through time, will be explored in relation to the figure of immigrants/migrants, a visible body of the other in a ‘home’ whose physical and mental constructions, meanings and ideologies have been destabilized in our contemporary society.[iv] The two works are interdependent in terms of subject, theme, context, as well as the way in which time is related.



2

With images of war-torn countries and acts of terrorism shown side by side, many Western countries have aimed to tighten their borders and security measures from fear of foreigners/the others. The host countries have developed hard-line policies towards immigrants, including long application processes and the strengthened security of many detention centres. It is in this in-between home, be it a detention centre, a refugee centre or a temporary shelter, while awaiting the result of their application, that the immigrants face the uncertainty of being rejected or accepted. It is this uncertain state or moment of becoming a citizen, in a in-between home, that I want to capture in Memory of the Last Supper.

By asking them about the memory of their last supper, they have the choice of going back, recollecting the past and bringing that moment of taking photographs into the now, or being in the present state of here and now. It is a moment of now that mirrors their situation, in which they are unable to move forward or backwards, of being in between both space and time. It is what makes possible the gap or the pause in time, to be able to look back into the past, and possibly into the future. According to Roland Barthes, in photography “time’s immobilization assumes only an excessive, monstrous mode: Time is engorged”.[v] This engorgement of time makes it possible for Memory of the Last Supper to create a delayed image through the aesthetics of delay between the real event of the last supper and the re-imagined one, the past and present home, the present and future home, reality and representation, and between the surface and the subtext.

In this delayed image is where ‘the mark of trauma’ could resurface. It is where the memories of the immigrants’ last suppers are usually traumatic, marking the moment of departure from family and homeland. Here one could borrow Mulvey’s argument in pointing to the correlation between the delay aesthetics and the relationship between trauma and exegesis in psychoanalysis, as she writes:

“Lacan’s category of ‘the Real’ refers to the actuality of a traumatic event, persona or historical. The mind searches for words or images that might translate and convey that reality. But its translation into ‘Symbolic’ form and into consciousness separates the two, just as an account of a dream is separated from the time of dreaming and loses its original feeling.”[vi]

The images stand for something of that ‘untranslatability’ of the fleeting moment, unsettling the notion of ‘home’. It is also an attempt to inscribe the multiple layers of those moments between the ‘traumatic past’ and the ‘uncertain future’, between the banality of the question and the mythical, religious-laden symbolism of the last supper, between the past and future. These delayed moments allow us to take a mental journey back in time and try to make some sense of them through temporality.



3

While Memory of the Last Supper is an attempt to make a mental journey back in time, The Missing Trilogy is an attempt to make a mental journey forward in space in order to construct a home. The wedding that is supposed to be a happy ending in the conventional narrative becomes the beginning of the end, the point of departure. Instead of beginning to build a home together, physically and metaphorically, ‘home’ for the new couple is to be delayed into the unknown future.

The two illegal immigrants decide to get married when the woman is allocated to the third country, in the hope that this will make it possible to reunite. Instead, the man’s attempt to join his wife is denied, as the marriage is not initially believed by the authorities, who see it as a fraud, a fake intimacy without meaning. The narrative then comes to a pause and its progress is delayed. He is engulfed in the moment of uncertainty, of waiting. Time seems to stand still. It is in this delay of the narrative that Deleuze’s idea of ‘time-image’ comes through. Instead of movements or actions to move the narrative forward, the film stares back in time. The passage of time is felt as the husband waits for the reunion in what seems like an eternity.

The different temporal orders between each of the three screens creates the tension between present time, time of the past, and possibly time in the future, disrupting the flow of conventional narrative time and opening up possible multi-narratives that play off each other, where the wedding could either be the happy ending to the traumatic past or it could only be possible in the imagination, and so on. Each of the screens provides a missing link to the narrative that may never be completed because of the lost origins. One always desires to fill in the gap of those lost beginnings.

The two works, Memory of the Last Supper and The Missing Trilogy, are to be seen in conjunction, interacting and interrelated in time, in a way that “the flow of the image at 24 frames a second tends to assert a ‘now-ness’ to the picture, [and] stillness allows access to the time of the film’s registration, its ‘then-ness’”.[vii] It is in the gap created from the juxtaposition of two different natures, between the ‘nowness’ and ‘thenness’, ‘still’ and ‘moving’, that perhaps one could understand the dynamic of the notion of ‘home’ experienced by the immigrants through this lak-ka-pid-lak-ka-perd of time.


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In Response to Memory of the Last Supper:
Sarat Maharaj:
During the presentation it occurred to me the ways in which the singularity of Boonnimitra’s viewpoint as a researcher comes through. This question, “What memory do you have of your last supper?,” is not a question that a sociologist would have asked. The question that would be asked by the gentle bureaucratic order would be: what was your last point of departure? Or what was your last nationality? What was your last set of support systems as it were? The very particularity of this question is that it asks such a doggedly mundane thing; it is a very ordinary experience you have been asking these people to recall. But the memory of the last supper has of course in itself, as a phrase, a very powerful symbolic load to it. That interested me straight away, that is, the promise or the possibility or the potential for some transformation such as one understands the last supper. Because it is that moment of transfiguration that is promised in that supper if one goes down that road of the symbolic order. But if you go down the road of the mundane, these are ordinary people and you’re asking them to recall a very personal, lived memory. I find it extremely interesting that we have these two orders rubbing up against each other. And it is precisely in showing the unsquarability of these two orders that you begin to pry open the space in the inquiry that will not be captured at all by someone carrying out sociological research or anthropological research or research into the legal status of these transients. So for me that is extremely interesting. What I am getting at is the question of if there is a particular standpoint from which an artist can begin an inquiry that is different from the narrative and analytical standpoints, the standpoint of inquisition, taken up by other disciplines? So I think what one is trying to argue here is that there are some specific issues that fall through the net of academic thinking, of disciplinary thinking, of established departmental thinking, which can be picked up by art practitioners. The point is that the madness or craziness of the question might be the interesting bit, because we’re seeing two or three other issues at play here.

One of them has to do with the production of illegality, now the dominant element in the executive sphere of contemporary society. There is a whole terminology—“illegal,” “clandestine,” “sans-papiers”—used to capture the identity of the individuals like those in Samut Sakhon[JW1] . But it is not identity that Boonnimitra seems to be interested in. That, I found, was a new element in her thinking and a very interesting and encouraging one. She looked backwards in her sources to Michel Foucault, but I was thinking that perhaps the concept of “the exodus” in Paolo Virno’s work comes closer to the notion of becoming that Boonnimitra is dealing with. What is that moment in the condition of movement from A to B where one is totally in a state of uprootedness? When one has left something, but hasn’t arrived, between departure and arrival . . . before one develops some sort of identity and thus becomes part of the structures of normality.

But in that moment of illegality lies the uncertainty, the sense of being neither one thing nor the other and that’s where the concept of lak-ka-pid-lak-ka-perd comes through, in describing this in-between condition of being neither one thing or the other. I really wanted to search for a non-western concept through which one might interrogate and explore this situation. And I am thinking of the Buddha himself, when asked: then what all is this consciousness you talk about? What is the state of critical consciousness that you’re referring to? Is it this? Is it that? And the Buddha replies, “neti, neti, neti,” meaning “not this, not that, not the other,” therefore pointing to a condition of indeterminacy. And it is this indeterminacy, which refuses to settle into any actual formed position and therefore refuses to take up an identity that becomes the interesting point of that particular expression.

I don’t want to repeat the word “indeterminate” too much, though. Because the minute we do, these words themselves begin to become rather fixed conceptual furniture. This traps us in the world of conceptualization, discourse, language and thinking through “what is ready-made in language?” and therefore there is always a moment when you have to go beyond that network in which we are trapped, that network of language. So again, becoming indeterminate, let’s us then, because we have to use words for today, but we constantly have to move beyond that. And that beyond for me is precisely the visual elements that are explored and gathered by Boonnimitra in her work. This is not visual to illustrate. This is not visual to simply back up the concept. But this is the visual again, like the phrase “memory of the last supper,” which rubs up against the linguistic and shows that it is unsquarable. That there is something doggedly that remains, which cannot be brought into language and will always be in excess of that particular linguistic formulation. And that is where it seems to me that she as a practitioner, as an artist, is bringing something new to this field of knowledge production, knowledge acquisition. If we say that the visual arts today, contemporary art, is a modality of knowledge production then we are asked the second question: what sort of knowledge? We have to unpack what the visual actually enables in the situation.

Perhaps the last point I would like to make is that Hannah Arendt indicated that the figure of the refugee would be the figure of the twentieth century. We understand the century through the image of the refugee, a person in exodus, who has left but not arrived. But of course we know that the majority of immigrants we talk about are very keen to get there. They want to arrive. We need to keep those markers in our mind and then try to understand that there are many different journeys that refugees make and not pack them all in one highly romantic idea and derive from it a critique only of the limitations of our society. We must look at it also from the point of view of the aspirations and desires of the refugees themselves and often all they want is passage from A to B. That is the mundane dimension of the question “memory of the last supper.” Are we romanticizing then the image of that moment of becoming? Are we deriving so much meaning out of it that we are talking louder than the experience of the refugee him/herself? That’s a question I want to ask. In the refugee we have begun to see all the ideals that have been missed or failed in the political sphere as we lived it as proper citizens. As if it is in the failed citizen, the refused citizen, in the non-citizen that there resides a body of values that we want somehow to recuperate. I think that would be a rather simplistic way of thinking of this set of issues. Instead, I ask how could we seek out the powerful ultimate horizon opened up by the presence of difference? I think that’s why we have to shift roles and find a way of stripping our own identities bare and learn to listen. I am quoting a friend of mine, Gayatri Spivak, who says: learn to listen from below the line of the NGO, I guess, below the line of visibility. And I heard her giving this lecture and I asked her: “Gayatri, I always wondered what sort of posture is the body in when you are actually exactly listening below this line of visibility? Are we kneeling? Are we crouching? Are we flat on our back? How are we listening to the other refugee when we shut up and we try to listen to what refugee is actually desiring?” My way of putting it is in not in terms of posture, which I think is a fantastic way in which she somehow imagines the relationship with difference in our midst. My way of putting it is just to make sure that we are not talking louder than the refugee. And in that sense, that we not over-interpreting, deriving such a powerful derivation out of the situation of refugees that we leave them high and dry and their aspirations, their day-to-day needs for security, for education, for comfort, for friendship, for society, whatever their ideas may be… And that’s what I mean by the unsquarability of these positions in which we find ourselves.

And what I am thinking is that beyond Hannah Ahrendt’s observation, the figure of our time is no longer the figure of the refugee, but the figure of the terrorist. The terrorist too is not able to live with difference. The terrorist says: become like me or I blast you and myself up. And that refusal or the incapacity to deal with difference is the one we have to struggle with. I am not saying that this is uncontroversial, but I think this is the kind of perspective that is mapping out at the moment. That figure of the terrorist must define that moment of non-communicable communication, that moment when something is being communicated, but there is refusal to use language, it is a refusal to live. There is in fact only negation that is offered. That one blast of nothingness must be contrasted to the negation of “neti, neti, neti,” which is a negation of a different order. I speak of a creative negation against nihilism, in which we are able to invoke difference, to see how things are different.

And don’t forget the art dimension. This is not just simply critical discursive thinking and analytical thinking that we are concerned with but we’re also concerned with perception and intensities. We’re forced to use language to describe what we are concerned with and the visual. But as you know one of the exercises I’ve done with a class in Sweden, in particular, is to give students the footnotes to Deleuze’s Rhizome essay, since it is so much discussed. Everyone explains the world through the Rhizome model; we see migration through the Rhizome network. We try to understand the indeterminate through the Rhizome. So I said to this class: “Do not read this essay. Cut it out and put the body of the essay in one box and then cut out the footnotes out of the essay and cut each footnote out into a strip in the way that someone like Daniel Spoerri would have done. Mix it up and then drop it and then use the strips. Paste them together in an order that you like and then reconstruct the essay by extrapolating from the footnotes.” Of course people do come up with a lot of rubbish, but nevertheless, the interesting thing is that it undermines and destabilizes the ready-made reading with which one is going to approach that particular text. It undermines the set of preconceptions within an inquiry.

And that’s another thing Boonnimitra is really concerned with. In mapping what is possible in the Netherlands, you find that, of course there is a network of NGOs already, but that the NGOs are to some extent a little bit uneasy that they form a very neat counter universe to the governmental organizations. And it is this neatness that seems to worry us and therefore you have to begin other ways of understanding. You have to cut out the footnotes, mix them up, throw them together. Footnotes suggest scholarship, they suggest an ordered mind, they suggest a methodology of procedure and so on. But they never reclaim the lived experience, the actual contributions of those who might have contributed to the making of a world of knowledge. I am constantly trying to get back to this is research and what is the nature of this research? That is a question that I am hoping that maybe you want to ask and want to discuss a little bit now. Because what we are seeing across Europe is a standardization of the art education system. We see through the Bologna process the introduction of BA, MA and PhD as a model for art education and the career of the making of the artist. And that is a thing that is not odd to us, coming from the other side of the English Channel, but then we are semi-detached from Europe and so for us it’s been a thirteen- year history of doing research in PhDs in visual arts practice. There is simply no question of that anymore in the academic world or the non-academic world is it possible to be a researcher through visual art? Are you trying to pretend you’re a scientist? All these questions that are still being debated in parts of Europe. The issue here is something you might want to explore, even with Boonnimitra herself since she is one of the first people to have done a PhD under the Bologna rules. And the idea of why should an artist feel that he or she can induct an inquiry that can produce new knowledge and what is the status of that knowledge vis-à-vis other disciplines? I think that’s the issue that comes out of this, if I may institutionalize the question a bit or put it back into the politics of the institutions of education since so much of the other commentary I made was on the philosophical and more theoretical level.

In fact I think the point that the presentation began with, that in asking what the systems of knowledge do not ask, one is opening space for new knowledge and in the production of that new knowledge, there you see the role of the artist-researcher. And this is why it could be so important not to see art research as simply translating philosophy back into the world of art. It would not be right to simply see it as importing theoretical concepts from all the other disciplines and as some people have felt, intellectualizing the artist. That would be a complete mistake. In a funny way, Duchamp’s famous statement that I will try to make it so that nobody will ever be able to say “as stupid as an artist.” Maybe today we have to reclaim that stupidity that he was so keen to dispense, because the journey out of that stupidity has possibly led us to a possible over-intellectualization of an external kind or that’s the tendency in our institutions. How can we revalidate the activity of art itself and see the activity itself as a probe and into the production of knowledge and new knowledge. And the example I give is precisely the question that Boonnimitra poses about the refugees. Elsewhere she might well use, in an eclectic way, in a very messy way, the questionnaires, the facts and figures gathered by the United Nation, by the Euro-bureaucracies of statistic knowledge that is gathered in Brussels. We could well use that. There’s no harm in that. That’s one way of thinking the world, one way of mapping. But there are other questions that need to be asked and in bringing in something like that I think you begin to question the processes of validation of what is knowledge. So for me that is one of the key issues in framing the disciplinary validity of art practice. It is not an add-on to the disciplines, nor on the other hand is a solution that art should be academicized in order to look respectable to the other disciplines. It is finding in art itself a mode of thinking, thinking in, with and through art practice. How could that be done? I don’t know; there are many instances of it. I find the minute you try to establish it as a philosophy in law, you have contradicted yourself in a way. That there is something in art itself that allows us to make very limited, very modest claims out of it and I think we must hold on to that modesty. And not attempt to establish a whole new discipline called, we use the phrase art research, but there is language again and its trap.



[i] Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image, London: Reaktion Books Ltd, 2006, p. 8.
[ii] Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The time-image, London: Athlone Press, 1989, p. xii.
[iii] Daniel Frampton, Filmosophy, London: Wallflower Press, 2006, pp. 69-70.
[iv] The concept of lak-ka-pid-lak-ka-perd is extensively explored in the thesis. Further information can be found on the website http://www.leavetoremain.com/.
[v] Roland Barthes, Camera Lucinda, New York: Hill and Wang, 1980, p. 91.
[vi] Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image, London: Reaktion Books Ltd, 2006, p. 128.
[vii] Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image, London: Reaktion Books Ltd, 2006, p. 102

[JW1]Same question as in Note 1