SONGS FOR DYING + TERRA INCOGNITA + YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE
Songs for Dying
Korakrit Arunanondchai / Thailand, United States, Norway / 2022 / 30 min
‘Songs for Dying’ interweaves histories of death and protest through memorial activities honoring the forgotten dead that allow for communal healing.
It is the narrating voice of a sea turtle—a revered spirit and descendant of a mythical dragon—that tells this story of loss, resistance, and familial love through which Arunanondchai’s memories of the last moments spent with his grandfather flow into the life of the forest, Jeju Island’s mythological origins, the legacy of haenyo’s sea farming culture, and their tribute to oceanic living systems. The footage of crowds that marched in protest of the Thai monarchy in 2020 to demand democratic reforms channels distant spirits—invoked in the shamanic rituals commemorating the Jeju uprising of 1948—with the promise of returning life to the anarchic forces of cosmic waters and ancestral currents.Presented in partnership with Art Hub Copenhagen and Han Nefkens Foundation.
Terra Incognita
Timoteus Anggawan Kusno / Indonesia / 2022 / 22 min
In his hypnotic ‘Terra Incognita’, Timoteus Anggawan Kusno questions colonial power and heritage by stretching in the liminality of fiction, history, imagination and memory.
To the rhythmic beat of a reading of a revolutionary Indonesian poem and the slamming of some trance-inducing drums, the artist creates a spectacular collage by juxtaposing old colonial prints, archive footage as well as his own oil paintings on top of the film itself. Memories of mass mobilisation during Indonesia’s regime succession are re-enacted, jostled; they overlap and finally dissolve into each other as the production of the fiction is exposed.Presented in partnership with Art Hub Copenhagen and Han Nefkens Foundation.
You Only Live Twice
Hwayeon Nam / Republic of Korea (South Korea) / 2022 / 48 min
A dialogue-free dance exercise in an empty warehouse in Busan becomes a meditation on the physical impermanence of the body.
A performance rehearsal is a time reserved for repeating the actions which will later be executed. Before a performance becomes an enactment of a singular event, performers use rehearsals as a means to prepare and practice the eventual extinction of the predetermined event. It is a repetition of suspension. You Only Live Twice captures a time of a performance rehearsal inspired by Auguste Rodin’s Gates of Hell in an obscure manner at Pier 1 of Busan Port, which has been abandoned after it served its purpose as a port. You Only Live Twice touches upon various aspects of human desire and imagination after the time of death and explores to link the time of rehearsal with death, the absolute event and gradual process of life, through embodying the complexity of emotions and expression of entangled human bodies conveyed in the Gates of Hell, referencing a scientific attempt towards the possibility of revival, and depicting the images of people falling asleep.Presented in partnership with Art Hub Copenhagen and Han Nefkens Foundation.