In his performance lecture, Mark Teh examines how public enemies are created, circulated, and remembered in Malaysia through the figure of Chin Peng, a communist leader and once the most wanted man in the British Empire. Image: Jakrawal Nilthamrong, Film still from "Zero Gravity", 2012, HD video, color, sound, 20 min Produced by Voice Republic For more podcasts visit http://voicerepublic.com
The presentation revolves around two connected works: Come Cannibalize Us, Why Don’t You? and Apa Jika, The Mis-placed Comma. Both projects discuss practices of collecting and display in the context of colonial and post-colonial museums and explore possible points of re-entry for the fugitive or rogue object. Come Cannibalize Us, Why Don’t You? is an artistic response that re-visits the artifacts and writings from an exhibition shown at the NUS Museum. Apa Jika, The Mis-placed Comma focuses on the ‘forgotten’ figure of a Malayan weaver in the British Empire Exhibition in 1924. The work was commissioned for the inaugural launch of Singapore’s National Gallery, and is currently exhibited in The Diaspora Pavilion, Venice. Both artworks engage with the tropes and traps involved in representation, and the transnational entanglements of moving objects and people. Erika Tan’s practice has evolved from an interest in received narratives, contested heritage, subjugated voices, and the transnational movements of ideas, people, and things. Her work arises out of processes of research and responses to the unravelling of facts, fictions, and encounters. Her work has been exhibited internationally, for instance at The Diaspora Pavilion (Venice Biennale 2017), Artist and Empire (Tate Touring, National Gallery Singapore, 2016/17); Come Cannibalise Us, Why Don’t You? (NUS Museum, Singapore, 2014), and There Is No Road (LABoral, Spain, 2010). Produced by Voice Republic For more podcasts visit http://voicerepublic.com
Scott's “anarchist” history of Southeast Asia’s upland peoples highlights the dynamics of flight, as a defense against the rationalization and encompassment wrought by modern states. As a political geography, Zomia may be no more, yet that fugitive logic has survived its historical moment. Where might we look today for the modes of withdrawal, and the autonomy that distinguished these uplanders? What stake might artists have in such strategies of avoidance? The fugitive instinct is alive and well in Southeast Asian contemporary art. Teh considers what these lines of flight might tell us about the scope and the limits of artistic independence and autonomy. Image: Jakrawal Nilthamrong, Film still from "Zero Gravity", 2012, HD video, color, sound, 20 min Produced by Voice Republic For more podcasts visit http://voicerepublic.com
In 2000, the ongoing conflict between the Shan state and the Burmese government intensified so that families of raided Shan villages fled the war into the mountains of the Thai-Burmese border. The documentary follows Sang Lod who loses his family and at the age of 18 joins the Shan State Army (SSA) to become a soldier with a lifetime duty to fight for Shan liberation from the Burmese. Sang Lod’s life is –like that of many others–determined by war, the rise of nationalism, ethnocentrism, and abstract borders. He lives in a vacuum between two countries, a liminal space where one remains in suspension. 21 years old and without legal documents to prove his existence or citizenship, Sang Lod faces the choice of either dreaming of a better life that may never come or making his peace with the life he leads in the army. Nontawat Numbenchapol is a documentary filmmaker based in Bangkok. In his work he examines places and people at the edges of Thai society through collaborations and observations. His current work in progress, No Boys Land, explores contested borderlands through the eyes of young soldiers from the stateless ethnic group of Shan. Image: Jakrawal Nilthamrong, Film still from "Zero Gravity", 2012, HD video, color, sound, 20 min Produced by Voice Republic For more podcasts visit http://voicerepublic.com
Image: Jakrawal Nilthamrong, Film still from "Zero Gravity", 2012, HD video, color, sound, 20 min Produced by Voice Republic For more podcasts visit http://voicerepublic.com
“Zomia,” the designation invented by Willen van Schendel for the portion of upland Southeast Asia that has, until recently, evaded incorporation into nation states and empires, could metaphorically be extended to other areas of the world that have become zones of state evasion. In his lecture, Scott explores some of these zones in Southeast Asia and elsewhere. Though Zomia is mountainous, wetlands, swamps, marshes, and deltas have also historically served as refugia for state-fleeing populations. Scott examines the principles of geography, subsistence practices, mobility, and social structure that abet both state avoidance and state-prevention. Image: Jakrawal Nilthamrong, Film still from "Zero Gravity", 2012, HD video, color, sound, 20 min Produced by Voice Republic For more podcasts visit http://voicerepublic.com
In this talk, Anselm Franke looks at the phenomena of the frontier – the often violent border zones where meaning, identity, and ownership are contested. Looking at a number of artworks that confront histories of colonial violence and state terrorism, the frontier is read as a zone of unruly mediations, whose inner workings and liminal states are directly reflected in aesthetics. Through works exhibited in the exhibition 2 or 3 Tigers, among others, a close connection is thus suggested between the history of imperial and national frontiers, media technologies, and their modes of representation. Image: Jakrawal Nilthamrong, Film still from "Zero Gravity", 2012, HD video, color, sound, 20 min Produced by Voice Republic For more podcasts visit http://voicerepublic.com