An invitation to experiment with liveness becomes a film without a film. May Adadol Ingawanij will go into conversation with Erin Gleeson, joined by Anocha Suwichakornpong and Pablo de Ocampo via zoom, to explore different takes on FREETIME, Suwichakornpong’s debut performance at the Walker Art Center, from the lens of their respective practices and roles in its production.
To attend, please RSVP. Admission is free.
Doors open: 19.15
Start Programme: 19.30
Drinks: 21.15 - 21.45
As an independent film director, screenwriter and producer, Anocha Suwichakornpong is known for her collaborative practice with actors on multilayered, anachronic narratives that grapple with participation, representation and remembrance relating to the violence of Thailand’s nationalist permutations. FREETIME was conceptualised as a live staged performance of a film in progress – a form of research towards her forthcoming feature film, ASR, which centers a fictional female character as she encounters the so-called final days of Siam/Thailand’s three kingdoms. The segment of ASR that became FREETIME unfolds one day in the current, undead Rattanakosin period with two friends from Bangkok (played by Ornanong Thaisriwong and Heen Sasithorn) – one actor and one director – as they edit a new film, walk in a park, and cook and eat dinner.
This event will be in part soundtrack, subtitles, screening, rehearsal, and thinking-through-together around aspects of FREETIME’s entanglement and translation of languages, conventions, limitations, and potentials of stage and screen, theater and cinema, and how this generously challenged and amplified the reflexive questions and desires motivating the practices of the many involved in its becoming.
FREETIME was written and directed by Anocha Suwichakornpong, commissioned by FD13 residency for the arts and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and produced by Erin Gleeson (Director and Curator, FD13) and Pablo de Ocampo (Director and Curator, Moving Image, Walker Art Center).
Anocha Suwichakornpong is a filmmaker whose work is informed by the socio-political history of Thailand. She lives and works in Bangkok and New York City, where she currently teaches film directing at Columbia University. Anocha founded the Bangkok-based production house, Electric Eel Films and co-founded Purin Pictures, a film fund that supports independent Southeast Asian Cinema. Anocha is a 2019 Prince Claus Laureate, DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Residency, and the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residency Program recipient. Her films have been screened at festivals such as Cannes, Sundance, Berlin, Locarno and Rotterdam.
Pablo de Ocampo is director and curator of Moving Image at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota. From 2014 to 2020, de Ocampo was exhibitions curator at the artist-run center Western Front in Vancouver, Canada. His previous positions include artistic director of Toronto’s Images Festival from 2006 to 2014, co-founder/collective member of Cinema Project in Portland, Oregon, and in 2013, programmer of the 59th Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, History is What’s Happening. His writing has appeared in Canadian Art, C Magazine, BlackFlash, and in the catalogues Dissident Lines: Lis Rhodes (Nottingham Contemporary), and Low Relief: Lucy Raven (EMPAC, Mousse, and Portikus).
Erin Gleeson is a researcher, curator and writer. Currently, they teach Critical Theory and Curatorial Studies, University of Minnesota (2020 - ) and are director and curator of FD13 residency for the arts (2021 -) through which they invite artists to Mní Sóta Makhóčhe to develop new work and present it live, most recently with Ima-Abasi Okon, Pio Abad, Kablusiak, and Yee I-Lann. Recent projects include Eulogy, a performance lecture, The New School, NYC (2022); Comeback Kid, a solo by Nicholas Grafia, Silverlens, Manila (2022); Now You See It; Now You Don’t with Natalie Ball (Klamath, Modoc), Eric-Paul Riege (Diné) and Grace Rosario Perkins (Diné/Akimel O’odham) (2023), Bockley Gallery, Minneapolis. Erin’s writing has been published by Urban Research, Sternberg Press, les presses du reel, Mousse, Documenta, among others. From 2011-2018, she was co-founding director and curator of SA SA BASSAC, a non-profit art center in Phnom Penh. They are advisor at Rijksakademie, Amsterdam.
May Adadol Ingawanij is a writer, curator, and teacher. She works on Southeast Asian contemporary art; de-westernised and decentred histories and genealogies of cinematic arts; avant-garde legacies in Southeast Asia; forms of future-making in contemporary artistic and curatorial practices; aesthetics and circulation of artists’ moving image, art and independent films belonging to or connected with Southeast Asia. She is Professor of Cinematic Arts at the University of Westminster where she co-directs the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media. She is an advisor at Rijksakademie, Amsterdam.
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