Ambiguity
Each artwork opens a new window into a diverse spectrum and subject matter. Devoid of word accessories in its moving image approach, it takes film beyond the mediums, territories, forms, and spaces that contest it. It walks between the cacophony of moving image definitions that question motive and meaning, fiction and nonfiction, real and surreal. The blurring provides an opening for the exploration of the medium, and an opportunity to observe the collision of historical texts with the present.
This gap leads us to a long contemplation of how artists’ work and cinema come together, offering each other a fresh way of storytelling and perspective to the audience. It also opens a space for imagination to fill the void of various spectrum movements in the definition of cinema, in our own minds. As an effort to bring a reciprocal awareness of the presence of the audience and the moving image, with the friction between the visible and the invisible, between text and image, this experience brings us to a liminal space that gives us an ambiguity in interpreting the mini-exhibition at FFD 2024.
Through the performative mise-en-scene, an attempt to fictionalize the auditive atmosphere through choreographed sound production, we are brought to an exploration of two actors performing a repertoire, building and dismantling ideas about monuments, ghosts and absence, in interaction under the ghostly rays of the Ghost Light. The presence of two cameras captured detailed gestures and expressions, as well as various “symbolic” things on the pedestal as an effort to present the non-present. Delving into the black and white frenzy of A Leap in Time, Stillness Whispers as one of the photographic realism in the universe of cinema, we are invited to be able to penetrate the material limits of the camera as a tool that is able to move memories of space and time.
Cinema is composed by fragments and collections of distinct elements. The interpretation of images in film and the combination of raw materials from colonial propaganda films in Surrounding Silences are prefabricated elements that can be disassembled and reassembled by artists into new juxtapositions. Meanwhile, the auditive experience moves through different incarnations, such as the entities from Buddhist cosmology in No Exorcism Film, bringing us to the correspondence of sounds that merge with images of Thailand’s aggressive urban development, personal (and historical) fears, and intergenerational expectations.
The fragments in these four artworks suggest that spectators bring their own emotional reactions–to the series of images that form the basis of cinema as a growing and interpretive art form that takes the phrase “filmmaking” literally.
— Alia Damaihati
