Titled ‘Convergence and Departure: Engagements in Moving-Image’, this three-part screening programme endeavours to expand the reach of moving-image in contemporary art discourse in Southeast Asia.

In fourteen videos, selected from the collection of the Han Nefkens Foundation, artists bend genre to grapple with rupture and hybridity, presenting other ways of being, other modes of seeing, other methods of creating, other histories, temporalities, and geographies. From works that animate the polyphonic world around us to those that deal with loss and dislocation on a personal, historical, and ecological scale, the programme highlights how artists are re-engaging and revitalising video art to bring renewed focus not only to moving images as a medium, but also to our changed and changing world. 

This public programme accompanies Truong Cong Tung’s The Disoriented Garden…A Breath of Dream, made possible by the Han Nefkens Foundation–Southeast Asian Video Art Production Grant, aimed at supporting the advancement of the contemporary video art field for artists living in Southeast Asia. 

Screening 1: Beyond Convention: Methods

Highlighting the growth of video as both medium and method, ‘Beyond Convention: Methods’ explores alternative techniques and technologies used in making a film. Gathering films diverse in their components of production and aesthetic, this screening takes a look at how artists have pushed the boundaries of video beyond its definition to deconstruct and reinvent what video is and what it reveals.

Screening 2: Between Art and Documentary 

The final screening in our video art series looks into the use of the ‘documentary mode’ in video art and its blurred boundaries with traditional documentary film. Presenting interviews, field studies, collaboration, and imagination as method and material for art-making and actionable change, the documentary mode can be described as a hybrid of cinema, video, and performance with the capacity to carry artistic, conceptual and political agendas all at once while edging the gap between art and life, fiction and reality, the political and the poetic. 

Screening 3: Disrupting Boundaries

‘Disrupting Boundaries’ takes a look at films embracing hybridity to create – or renew – connections  between places, cultures, communities, and histories. Taking inspiration from past events and archival footage, and by remixing them with different temporalities and locations, the selected works are able to generate new narratives. They investigate merging & mixing as a practice, and the ways it reveals, distorts, and unsettles, our own vision of everyday life.