Divided into two sessions, the symposium explores the artists’ working processes and methodological approaches through structured conversations consisting of lectures, presentations, and moderated discussions. The focus will lie on the sources of inspiration as well as on the motivations of the artists’ practices, and on the construction and contestation of official narratives. Ho Tzu Nyen, Nguyen Trinh Thi, and Park Chan-kyong will expand on the historical events and socio-political contexts that feed into their work, and on the different strategies employed to revive collective memory. Scholar Dr Clare Veal will highlight the medium specificity in the works of Apichatpong Weerasethakul to address conflicted histories, whereas the lectures by curators Dr June Yap and Hyunjin Kim, as well as the keynote lectures by Dr May Adadol Ingawanij and Professor Kenneth Dean, aim to articulate the complicated geopolitical relations in contemporary Asia.
11.00am – 1.10pm
Session I: Shadows of History
Chaired by Dr Roger Nelson, curator and art historian, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, School of Art Design and Media, Nanyang Technological University (NTU), and NTU CCA Singapore
Dedicated to the uncovering of neglected histories, this session will look at the construction of historical narratives and their role in reflecting social, political, and cultural conditions. Occluded by the propagation of progress and nation building, what has been left out and rendered unspeakable in the region’s bid to establish national identities and political autonomy? Referencing the works of Ho Tzu Nyen and Nguyen Trinh Thi, this session traces post-war and Cold War legacies in Asia and investigates their lingering spectres.
2.30 – 5.30pm
Session II: Ghosts and Spectres
Chaired by Dr David Teh, researcher and curator, Assistant Professor, Department of English Language and Literature, National University of Singapore (NUS)
Referencing the works of Park Chan-kyong and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, this session deals with notions of ghosts and spectres as allegories of historical moments and dreamlike realities. Embedded in myths and folklore, what roles do they play in constructing an understanding of the past and in reflecting socio-political circumstances? How do cinematic works engage their medium-specificity in a play of historical phantoms and repressed collective memories, to create a language for portraying trauma, loss, dreams, and nightmares?
This is a public programme of Ulrike Ottinger: China. The Arts – The People, Photographs and Films from the 1980s and 1990s.
Tickets: S$13.50 standard; S$11.50 concession. Purchase at theprojector.sg
Introduction by Professor Ute Meta Bauer, Founding Director, NTU CCA Singapore, and Professor, School of Art, Design and Media (ADM), NTU
Vampir-Cuadecuc is arguably one of the key films for understanding the transition in the Spanish film world from the period of the “new cinemas” (permitted by the Franco government) towards the illegal, clandestine, or openly antagonistic practices against the Franco regime. The film consists of shooting the filming of a commercial film El Conde Drácula by Jesús Franco. Portabella practices two types of violence on the standard narrative: he totally eliminates colour and substitutes the soundtrack with a landscape of image-sound collisions by Carles Santos. Filmed provocatively in 16mm with sound negative, Vampire-Cuadecuc stages the tensions between the black and white of the film stock, and reveals the “fantasmatic materialism” that dominant narrative cinema is reliant upon.
This Screening is part of the public programme of Ghosts and Spectres – Shadows of History.
Considered one of Cocteau’s masterpieces, Orpheus updates the myth of Orpheus and depicts a famous poet, scorned by the Left Bank youth, and his love for both his wife, Eurydice, and a mysterious princess. Seeking inspiration, the poet follows the princess to the land of the dead, through Cocteau’s famous mirrored portal. Translating this Greek myth by adapting the story about love, death, and the underworld into a modern scenario allows Cocteau to resonate political questions concerning some younger historical events like war, oppression, and Nazism. This film is the central part of Cocteau’s Orphic Trilogy, the other two being The Blood of a Poet (1930) and Testament of Orpheus (1960).
This Screening is part of the public programme of Ghosts and Spectres – Shadows of History.
Park’s first full-length feature film, Anyang, Paradise City is a mix between documentary and fiction, inspired by a seldom-remembered incident during the Olympic Games in 1988, where 22 female workers were killed in a fire in Anyang. The glorious past of Anyang (a Buddhist term for “paradise”) allegedly includes the existence of a huge temple surrounded by the beautiful mountains and streams around 1000 years ago. Researching into Buddhism and the history of Anyang, Park follows the temple excavations and searches for the 500-year-old “grandma tree”. The film traces this past through the natural landscape and alludes to the future through the city’s mayoral election. As if travelling between paradise and hell, the camera hunts, rests, and plays as if dancing with the cityscape, while layering narrative, history, contemporary life, landscape/ architecture, and politics.
This Screening is part of the public programme of Ghosts and Spectres – Shadows of History.