The plot revolves around a spreading epidemic of sleeping sickness where spirits appear to the stricken and hallucination becomes indistinguishable from reality. The epidemic is used as a metaphor for personal and Thai societal issues.
Soldiers with a mysterious sleeping sickness are transferred to a temporary clinic in a former school. The memory-filled space becomes a revelatory world for a housewife and volunteer Jenjira, as she watches over Itt, a handsome soldier with no family visitors. Jen befriends young medium Keng who uses her psychic powers to help loved ones communicate with the comatose men. Doctors explore ways, including coloured light therapy, to ease the mens’ troubled dreams. Jen discovers Itt’s cryptic notebook of strange writings and blueprint sketches. There may be a connection between the soldiers’ enigmatic syndrome and the mythic ancient site that lies beneath the clinic. Magic, healing, romance and dreams are all part of Jen’s tender path to a deeper awareness of herself and the world around her.
Friday, 3 June 2016, 7.30 – 10.00pm
Tropical Malady (2004) | 118 mins
Keng is a soldier assigned to a post in a small city in rural Thailand. The troops’ main duties, it seems, is to investigate the mysterious slaying of cattle at local farms. While in the field one day, Keng meets Tong. Both of them share a connection and embark on a romance, taking trips in the countryside.
One night, the country boy wanders off into the dark. The film’s narrative abruptly shifts to a different story, about a soldier sent alone into the woods to find a lost villager. In the woods, the soldier encounters the spirit of a tiger shaman, who taunts and bedevils the soldier, causing him to run through the woods and become lost and isolated himself.
This screening is a public programme of Charles Lim Yi Yong: SEA STATE.]]>The plot revolves around a spreading epidemic of sleeping sickness where spirits appear to the stricken and hallucination becomes indistinguishable from reality. The epidemic is used as a metaphor for personal and Thai societal issues.
Soldiers with a mysterious sleeping sickness are transferred to a temporary clinic in a former school. The memory-filled space becomes a revelatory world for a housewife and volunteer Jenjira, as she watches over Itt, a handsome soldier with no family visitors. Jen befriends young medium Keng who uses her psychic powers to help loved ones communicate with the comatose men. Doctors explore ways, including coloured light therapy, to ease the mens’ troubled dreams. Jen discovers Itt’s cryptic notebook of strange writings and blueprint sketches. There may be a connection between the soldiers’ enigmatic syndrome and the mythic ancient site that lies beneath the clinic. Magic, healing, romance and dreams are all part of Jen’s tender path to a deeper awareness of herself and the world around her.
Friday, 3 June 2016, 7.30 – 10.00pm
Tropical Malady (2004) | 118 mins
Keng is a soldier assigned to a post in a small city in rural Thailand. The troops’ main duties, it seems, is to investigate the mysterious slaying of cattle at local farms. While in the field one day, Keng meets Tong. Both of them share a connection and embark on a romance, taking trips in the countryside.
One night, the country boy wanders off into the dark. The film’s narrative abruptly shifts to a different story, about a soldier sent alone into the woods to find a lost villager. In the woods, the soldier encounters the spirit of a tiger shaman, who taunts and bedevils the soldier, causing him to run through the woods and become lost and isolated himself.
This screening is a public programme of Charles Lim Yi Yong: SEA STATE.Experimental in form as well as in method, Climates. Habitats. Environments. features an inventive book design by mono.studio that puts word and image on equal footing, offering a multiplicity of media, interpretations, and manifestations of interdisciplinary research. For example, botanist Matthew Hall draws on Ovid's Metamorphoses to discuss human-plant interpenetration; curator and writer Venus Lau considers how spectrality consumes—and is consumed—in animation and film, literature, music, and cuisine; and critical theorist and filmmaker Elizabeth Povinelli proposes “Water Sense” as a geontological approach to “the question of our connected and differentiated existence,” informed by the “ancestral catastrophe of colonialism.” Artists excavate the natural and cultural DNA of indigo, lacquer, rattan, and mulberry; works at the intersection of art, design, and architecture explore “The Posthuman City”; an ongoing research project investigates the ecological urgencies of Pacific archipelagos. The works of art, the projects, and the majority of the texts featured in the book were commissioned by NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore.
]]>Experimental in form as well as in method, Climates. Habitats. Environments. features an inventive book design by mono.studio that puts word and image on equal footing, offering a multiplicity of media, interpretations, and manifestations of interdisciplinary research. For example, botanist Matthew Hall draws on Ovid's Metamorphoses to discuss human-plant interpenetration; curator and writer Venus Lau considers how spectrality consumes—and is consumed—in animation and film, literature, music, and cuisine; and critical theorist and filmmaker Elizabeth Povinelli proposes “Water Sense” as a geontological approach to “the question of our connected and differentiated existence,” informed by the “ancestral catastrophe of colonialism.” Artists excavate the natural and cultural DNA of indigo, lacquer, rattan, and mulberry; works at the intersection of art, design, and architecture explore “The Posthuman City”; an ongoing research project investigates the ecological urgencies of Pacific archipelagos. The works of art, the projects, and the majority of the texts featured in the book were commissioned by NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore.