LEGACIES | ROUTES

CIRCUIT and Storage (Bangkok) are delighted to announce the exhibition and gathering LEGACIES | ROUTES, featuring moving image artists connected with the Pacific Islands and Southeast Asia whose practices embrace a multiplicity of inheritances and decentred ways of world-faring. Curated in collaboration with May Adadol Ingawanij and FAFSWAG Arts Collective, LEGACIES | ROUTES is an invitation to gather around a screen to encounter, entangle, and translate stories that are rooting, growing and living nearby.

LEGACIES | ROUTES comprises an exhibition, in-person conversations, and an evening of film screenings.

The artists’ moving image exhibition Legacies takes place at Storage Art Space between 3 August—1 October, accompanied by a gathering on 6 August. The off-site screening programme Routes takes place at Doc Club & Pub Cinema on 11 August.

LEGACIES exhibition 

Storage Art Space

3 August—1 October 2023

What does a legacy taste, smell, sound, feel, or look like?

Legacies is CIRCUIT's 2022 programme of artist cinema commissions, featuring five new moving image works by Edith Amituanai, Martin Sagadin, Ukrit Sa-nguanhai, Pati Tyrell, and Sriwhana Spong, created in response to a series of propositions by CIRCUIT’s 2022/23 curator-at-large, Dr May Adadol Ingawanij:

"What do we do with the legacies that make us? How do they hold us back? How do we go forward with the full force of the past? Legacies are things that we carry with our bodies, sometimes with pride and sometimes with shame, our emotional textures and our baggage, the basis of social bonding, an ancestral land, an enduring pain, a burden, some kind of ghost, an invitation into futurist kinship, stories for future making."

Each artist was invited to make a short film articulating the artist's own personal response to the term.

LEGACIES gathering  

Storage Art Space

Sunday 6 August, 2pm—6pm

To accompany the Legacies exhibition, Storage will host a special day of in-person conversations and an additional screening programme.

2pm—4pm Conversation: De-centering Artist Moving Image 

An in-person conversation with the artists and curator of Legacies: Martin Sagadin, Pati Tyrell, Ukrit Sa-nguanhai, May Adadol Ingawanij, and CIRCUIT director Mark Williams. Moderated by curator, writer and researcher Erin Gleeson (Director, FD13 Residency for the Arts, Minnesota; Advisor, Rijksakademie).

4.30pm—6pm Screening: Martin Sagadin, The Short Trilogy of Peace (2016) 

A one-off screening of Martin Sagadin's moving image The Short Trilogy of Peace, which comprises three short films made between 2012 and 2016. Filmed through a silk filter, a static camera observes the activity of a factory, a home, landscapes, and the care and rest of an elderly person. Filmed between Ōtautahi in New Zealand and Kranj in Slovenia, the mood of the films is patient, observational, and painterly.

Before the screening of The Short Trilogy of Peace, Martin will present a music video that they directed for Richard Dada’s Pink Flamingos. Followed by a post-screening conversation with May Adadol.

ROUTES Cinema Screening 

Doc Club & Pub Cinema 

Friday 11 August, 6pm—9.30pm

FAFSWAG, CIRCUIT and Storage co-present two special screening programmes at Doc Club & Pub cinema, supported by the New Zealand Embassy in Bangkok.

6pm Screening: DIASPORA RENDERED

Today’s Queer Indigenous Moana people experience complex intersecting social and cultural pluralities within their daily life. Forging identities that are grounded in cultural traditions, yet continually impacted by modernity and urbanism. This can be seen in the hybrid identities that have emerged within a digital landscape in the past ten years. Revealing an overwhelming and sometimes bloated social media terrain, where the children of working-class immigrants in Aotearoa New Zealand self-identify with terms like Pacific Diaspora.

Diaspora Rendered is a compilation of short digital works and experimental films created by members of the FAFSWAG Arts Collective. These works explore the experiences of cultural displacement and try to unpack the term ‘Pacific Diaspora’, what it means to live in our current time with bodies and identities that have navigated centuries of displacement both geographically and temporally. These works show artists using digital tools to reclaim narratives, explore uncharted space, contemplate lineage and legacy, and redefine preconceived Ideas of self, family, home and culture.

Curated by FAFSWAG Arts Collective.

8pm Screening: RETURNS 

A collection of recent short films from Aotearoa New Zealand exploring the eternal timelines of people, place and materials. Curated by Mark Williams, director of CIRCUIT Artist Moving Image.

Artists: Leala Faleseuga, Sorawit Songsataya, Phil Dadson, Jamie Berry, Christopher Ulutupu, and Keri-Mei Zagrobelna.

LEGACIES | ROUTES was made possible through pooling the monetary, labour, time and relational resources of Storage, CIRCUIT, FAFSWAG, the participating artists, curator, and moderator; and with the support of the New Zealand Embassy in Bangkok, the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM), University of Westminster, and Doc Club & Pub Cinema, Bangkok.