This selection of artist films and video art is centred around the body in all its perceiving and expressive capacities, material realities and mythic imaginaries. Nineteen moving image works by seventeen international artists are presented across three themed compilations of short films, and a special feature-length presentation. In Movement in Space, the performing body is depicted charting social spaces, exploring relationality, and demonstrating psychological states. The films in Voice and Being assert the lived experiences of human and non-human subjects through testimony of speech and gesture. The works in The Worldly and Otherworldly crisscross between the earthly and spiritual realms, from the pervasive media environments of contemporary living, to the sensory, spectral visions of folktales and rituals. The programme concludes with Future Shock, a dystopic, dream-like tale of the last human on the planet.

Curated by Sam I-shan

Sam I-shan is an independent curator focusing on moving image, photography, and art and politics. She programmes for film festivals, specialising in artist films and video, and Southeast Asian cinema, working with Singapore International Film Festival, Art SG and Videoex Zurich. She was previously curator at National Gallery Singapore, Singapore Art Museum and Esplanade Visual Arts. Exhibitions include Nowhere Here (SIPF), Sim Chi Yin: One Day We’ll Understand (Rencontres d’Arles, France), Cao Fei, Georgette Chen: At Home in the World (NGS), and Afterimage: Contemporary Photography in Southeast Asia (SAM). At SAM, she headed moving image initiatives and co-programmed the annual Southeast Asian Film Festival. She lives and works in Singapore and Cambodia.

ART SG FILM is held at ArtScience Museum
ArtScience Cinema
L4, 6 Bayfront Ave Singapore, 018974
Movement in Space (Running Time: 62 min 22 sec)

The films in this programme reflect the centrality of the body in performance, political and personal works. The performing body might represent individuality, identity and corporeality, while serving as metaphor for communities, states and societies. The subduing or regulation of such a body politic is suggested by the performances in Tanatchai Bandasak’s and Jason Wee’s works. The former depicts the methodical action of grass-trimming in a historical site of political crisis, while the latter focuses on the artist dancing alone under a highway as ambiguous poetic texts about expectation, desire and social control unfurl across his form. The performers in Tsubasa Kato’s and Markus Schinwald’s works engage in choreographies of attraction and repulsion. Respectively, they demonstrate the tension between autonomy and dependency, and the struggles of bridging intrinsic differences. This sense of relation to an other is also key in Shinobu Soejima’s stop-motion animation, which externalises upon its battling characters the complex moral stakes of human nature and the impossibility of escaping cycles of violence. In Hou I-Ting and Yeo Siew Hua’s works, the setting becomes a key player. For Hou, the figure acts as mediator and scale for her perspectival experiments in urban distortion. In Yeo’s film, an abandoned institution seems to surreally transform itself into a stage for its characters, as they use dance and movement to express the mutable yet rigid nature of family dynamics, and ask whether any person can be completely knowable.

https://www.artsg.com/film/