XING | Nameless. echoes, spectres, hisses

29 June - 27 July 2020

NAMELESS. ECHOES, SPECTRES, HISSES

ONLINE SCREENING

CURATED BY XING
29 June :: BENJAMIN TAUSIG

1 July :: RUSSELL MORTON

3 JuLY :: SRIWHANA SPONG

5 JULy :: PATHOMPON MONT TESPRATEEP

7 JULY :: SUNG TIEU

9 JULY :: DIVISI62
Akin to a melody,

the screening unfolds

overtime…

With a focus on South East Asia, Nameless. echoes, spectres, hisses is a screening of moving images, sound and essays investigating the relationship between sound and place; lending an ear to the chimings and utterances of the region that is in continuous flux.

Unearthed languages of Kristang; weaponised voices used against the Viet Cong soldiers; chants of Bangkok in revolt; hisses pulled into language; a funeral song devoted to the afterlife. This dialogue between practices attests to the intricacies of the region’s history. Ghosts of past conflicts, fading communities and endangered dialects haunt any fixed definition of the region.

In this shifting plane, personal accounts, silenced narratives and humming dissent invites the viewer to listen and tune into versions of histories which might otherwise be muffled.

The works are unveiled every two days & remain online until 27 July. XING is a research platform. This screening is co-curated by Jade Barget & Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee.
BENJAMIN TAUSIG
Image courtesy: Ben Tausig

Benjamin Tausig (b.USA) is a scholar whose research focuses on sound, labour and protest in South East Asia. He authored Bangkok is Ringing: Sound, Protest, and Constraint which analysed the 2010-11 Red Shirt protest. His first-person ethnographic fieldwork over sixteen months, combines ethnomusicological analysis with sound studies analysis.

Tapping into sound’s physical limits and its subjection to political control, Tausig closely relates the way sound moves to the viability of political movements. Tausig is currently researching the musical intimacies of Thailand during the Vietnam War.
Bangkok is Ringing IS A vital resource for listening anew to the sounds of protest and power today

-Stefan Helmreich, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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Benjamin Tausig
Excerpt from Field recordings, "Protesters Chant On Behalf of the Dead in Ratchaprasong Intersection”, 2010

Audio only
29 secs

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thîi nîi mii khon taay

...'here are dead people',

or ‘there are dead

people here’,

‘people died here’

or even 'I see dead people'

Tausig's recording of chanting in Ratchaprasong, Bangkok, on the 13th of June 2010...

...the epicenter of recent violence against protesters.

Protesters are chanting a phrase thîi nîi mii khon taay which could be translated as

‘people died here’ or ‘there are dead people here’.

This Thai phrase is malleable and lends an ambiguity

in which the presence of the dead can be construed:

there are literally dead bodies there and

their specters are still haunting the intersection.

The chant also acted as a deliberate haunting

of the space by the announcement of the past.
Protesters Chant on Behalf of the Dead in Ratchaprasong Intersection
by Benjamin Tausig

Read more here
RUSSELL MORTON
Image courtesy: Russell Morton

Russell Adam Morton (b. 1982, Singapore) is a filmmaker and visual artist. His interest lies in folklore and mythologies, the relationship between the human experience with ancient narratives.

He has participated several group shows in London including the South London Gallery and Gasworks. Recent screenings include: Athens Video Art Festival 2012, National Museum of Singapore’s 10th Singapore Short Cuts 2013, The Substation’s 4th Experimental Film Forum 2013 and the Thai Short Film & Video Festival 2014. Morton won Best Experimental Film at the 5th Singapore Short Film Awards 2014. He was also the Director of Photography for Ang Song Ming’s Recorder Rewrite, Singapore’s entry to the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019.
Saudade is a torn up love letter, its heart spilt at the seams

-Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee
When Ghosts Walked Among Men
On Russell Morton’s Saudade

by Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee

Read more here
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Russell Morton

Saudade, 2020

HD video with audio

21mins 04secs

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Using folklore and myth, Saudade is narrated in Kristang -a creole language that emerged in 16th century Portuguese colonial Malacca. Today, it is a Malaysian state on the Malay Peninsula's southwest coast. With a highly strategic state position for international trade routes, Malacca was once a well-known international trade centre in the East. The territory of Malacca was a Portuguese colony for 130 years before ceding control to the Dutch & subsequently the British.

This cinematic work is woven in three acts: a song and dance of the Jinkli Nona; a scene between a shrimp fisherman and his wife; a cross-cultural encounter with the orang minyak (Malay monsters). The intermingled Asian and European ancestry of the domiciled community is captured through the seemingly disparate appearance of a supernatural Malay legend alongside characters donning costumes that draw upon the conventions of Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch dress.

This work was commissioned by Asian Film Archive for State of Motion 2020: Rushes Of Time
SRIWHANA SPONG
Sriwhana Spong (b. 1979, New Zealand) is of Indonesian descent, currently living and working in London. Her works draws on the writings of female medieval mystics, exploring the relationship of the body to language.

Spong's work has been shown at Pump House Gallery, London; Spike Island, Bristol; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Singapore; Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam; The Jewish Museum, New York. Previous artist residencies including: Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth (2018); Gasworks, London (2016); DAAD, Berlin (2015); ISCP, New York (2008). In 2012, she was nominated for the Walters Prize, New Zealand’s largest contemporary art prize. She has been recently selected for David Roberts Art Foundation’s new commission development programme which will include a new live performance in 2021.
This might also be the location of the mystic, standing at the threshold between

language and the ineffable, declaratively pointing to something I can’t quite see,

announcing themselves and me and it, tracing a triad,

a ground between three that shimmers with kinship and difference.

-Artist
having-seen-snake
by Sriwhana Spong

Read more here
Installation View: Michael Lett, Auckland, 2017
Sriwhana Spong

having-seen-snake, 2016

16mm transferred to HD video

13 mins 45secs

Edition of 3

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And a loud silence, like the brightness, as if hearing every sound all at once. In a snap. I’m suddenly spectral and wide-open. “SNAKE.”

This work uses, as its starting point, an encounter between the artist and a garter snake. A surreal imprint of place and sensory experience is juxtaposed with an interview with a scientist centred around a new species of snake recently discovered in the Amazon.

The scientist describes the process of designating a name and what it means to transfer something from the unspoken into the realm of the spoken. The film ends with the song of the Rothschild’s mynah recorded at the National Aviary in Pittsburgh. The bird, endemic to Bali, is currently on the brink of extinction due to poaching.
Image: Sriwhana Spong. 'having-seen-snake', 2016
PATHOMPON MONT TESPRATEEP
Pathompon Mont Tesprateep (b.1978, Thailand) is an editor, director, screenwriter, and cinematographer based in Bangkok. He is primarily known for making video art that is processed by hand on Super 8mm and 16mm film.

His films have been shown at film festivals, including Locarno Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, BFI London Film Festival, Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, Les Rencontres Internationales, Curtas Vila do Conde and Hamburg International Short Film Festival.

"Song X is an attempt to compose an extended version of [a] posthumous song, as a form of a visual poem, portraying life after death.

It is a means to deliver out a message to my deceased band member and friend, and a memorial ritual for the dead."

- Pathompon Mont Tesprateep

How else to resist?
On Pathompon Mont Tesprateep’s Song X

by Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee

Read more here
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Pathompon Mont Tesprateep

Song X , 2017

16mm & Super 8 (B&W, no dialogue)

20 mins 19 secs

Edition of 5

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SUNG TIEU
Sung Tieu (b.1987, Vietnam) is a Berlin and London-based artist. Her work contends with notions of history and analyses transnational movements of both people and objects—be it through the investigation of diaspora communities or the commercial, hyper accelerated ways that global capitalism is reproduced.

Recent solo exhibitions include Zugzwang at Haus der Kunst, Munich and In Cold Print at Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham. Forthcoming exhibitions include the 34th São Paulo Biennial; Hamburger Bahnhof Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin; GAMeC, Bergamo; Kunstmuseum Bonn; 1st Prague Biennale and Emalin, London.
Delving into the impossibility of knowing, the heard but not seen,

belief systems and conspiracy theories, Sound TV leaves us asking:

when a sound is indefinitely reverberated, who thinks of doubting his ears?

-Jade Barget
When a sound is indefinitely reverberated, who thinks of doubting his ears?
On Sung Tieu’s Sound TV

by Jade Barget

Read more here
Sung Tieu

Sound TV, 2020

HD video with audio

5m 20 secs

Edition of 5

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Sound TV investigates audio-technologies, belief systems and war technology of “Ghost Tape No. 10”, a sonic weapon devised by the US Army’s PSYOPS during the Vietnam War. The piece is accompanied by footage shot in the Mekong Delta’s Mo Cay, expanding on the intersection between psychoacoustics, brain damage, infrastructures of control and geopolitics. The sound work interweaves a secret message hidden in ambient noise and research into brain scans affected by sonic frequencies.

Inspired by Nam June Paik's body of work, the work challenges contemporary understandings of visual footage by juxtaposing it alongside auditive effects of psychological warfare. This work premiered in London at Tate Modern’s Star Cinema in February 2020.
Image still: Sung Tieu. Sound TV, 2020. Courtesy of the artist & Emalin, London
DIVISI62
DIVISI62 (founded 2016) is a Jakarta-based collective utilising Indonesian traditional foundations to craft sounds exploring modern cultural Indonesian identity.

DIVISI62 have performed at Berghain/Panorama Bar, Berlin; Kunstencentrum Vooruit, Gent; Les Ateliers Claus, Brussels; WORM, Rotterdam; Filmwerkstatt, Dusseldorf and Katakomben Theater, Essen.
KABUT TRANSLATES AS MIST, OR FOG, AND ZAMAN AS AGE

...

THE MIST OF THE AGES,

OR THE AGE OF MIST
On Kabut Zaman by DIVISI62

by Jade Barget

Read more here
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DIVISI62

Kabut Zaman , 2020

HD video with audio

5 min 32 secs

Edition of 5 plus 2APs

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LEARN MORE ABOUT XING

XING is a research platform centered on the poetics and politics of Southeast and East Asian art practices. Assuming form of a shapeshifter, it morphs between localities and temporalities; with(in)flux. A domain of not-yet possibilities, the platform attempts to dismantle matrices concerned with the region from non-dominant perspectives.

The co-curators for this screening are Jade Barget & Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee

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Online viewing room | Nameless. echoes, spectres, hisses (29 June - 27 July 2020)

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XING | Nameless. echoes, spectres, hisses

NAMELESS. ECHOES, SPECTRES, HISSES

ONLINE SCREENING

CURATED BY XING

29 June :: BENJAMIN TAUSIG

1 July :: RUSSELL MORTON

3 JuLY :: SRIWHANA SPONG

5 JULy :: PATHOMPON MONT TESPRATEEP

7 JULY :: SUNG TIEU

9 JULY :: DIVISI62

BENJAMIN TAUSIG

Bangkok is Ringing IS A vital resource for listening anew to the sounds of protest and power today

RUSSELL MORTON

Saudade is a torn up love letter, its heart spilt at the seams

SRIWHANA SPONG

This might also be the location of the mystic, standing at the threshold between

language and the ineffable, declaratively pointing to something I can’t quite see,

announcing themselves and me and it, tracing a triad,

a ground between three that shimmers with kinship and difference.

PATHOMPON MONT TESPRATEEP

"Song X is an attempt to compose an extended version of [a] posthumous song, as a form of a visual poem, portraying life after death.

It is a means to deliver out a message to my deceased band member and friend, and a memorial ritual for the dead."

SUNG TIEU

Delving into the impossibility of knowing, the heard but not seen,

belief systems and conspiracy theories, Sound TV leaves us asking:

when a sound is indefinitely reverberated, who thinks of doubting his ears?

DIVISI62

KABUT TRANSLATES AS MIST, OR FOG, AND ZAMAN AS AGE

...

THE MIST OF THE AGES,

OR THE AGE OF MIST

LEARN MORE ABOUT XING

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Online viewing room | Nameless. echoes, spectres, hisses (29 June - 27 July 2020)

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