43:05 minutes
Miljohn Ruperto’s research-based multidisciplinary practice often deals with possession, re-enactment, mythology and archives. These conceptual throughlines also underpin Ruperto and Minnesota-based director Rini Yun Keagy’s eerie experimental documentary Ordinal (SW/NE) , which collapses mythology, scientific research, Californian agricultural history, American literature, and speculative fiction into a poetic and timely examination of possession, infection, and individual agency in an age of wanton industrial agriculture and alienation. Ordinal (SW/NE) tells the tale of a young Black man named Josiah as he navigates the banalities of daily life while potentially being possessed by a malignant supernatural force or stricken by valley fever, a little-known yet gruesome and sometimes lethal real-life respiratory illness which disproportionately affects farm and field workers, particularly Filipinos and African-Americans. Scenes from Josiah’s movements through institutional and domestic spaces are interwoven with drone footage of vast golden fields, archival photography of California dust storms so enormous that they appear biblical, and black-and-white footage of a scene from John Steinbeck’s canonical novel The Grapes of Wrath , which follows the desolate journey of impoverished American migrants during the Great Depression. Ordinal (SW/NE) is a prismatic work, an expansive Pandora’s Box of storylines moving between the past, present, and mythological time. Yet it remains grounded in regional specificity, as it traces the spiritual effects and cultural-environmental influences of valley fever and the pathogenic fungus coccidioides immitis that causes it. While endemic to the Southwestern United States, valley fever is particularly common in the Central Valley of California, which is the agricultural engine of California as well as a repository for much of the state’s air pollution. The region represents both the insistence of desert irrigation as well as the threat of man-made drought and respiratory sickness, both the miracle of technology and the revenge of the gods.
Miljohn Ruperto is a cross-disciplinary artist working across photography, cinema, performance, and digital animation. His work refers to historical and anecdotal occurrences, and speculates on the nature of assumed facts and the construction of truth. Often involving replicas, modified versions, and enactments—including Chinese-made reproductions of Caspar David Friedrich’s The Monk by the Sea ; modified images based on the 15th century Voynich Manuscript; or reworked footage of Filipino actress Isabel Rosario Cooper—Ruperto takes cultural and historical references and untethers them from their original context to challenge our perception and generate something altogether new. Ruperto’s work is often informed by his collaborations with experts from other disciplines including Dutch animator Aimée de Jongh, neuroscientist and engineer Rajan Bhattacharyya, photographer Ulrik Heltoft among others. Through a richness and diversity of lenses, and preferencing the obscure, mysterious and the magical, his work challenges fixed conceptions of truth and history, and instead speaks of an indeterminacy and subjectivity of experience that renders truth and fiction near indistinguishable.
Natasha Wheat’s Kerosene Triptych (2011) is composed of three images, one each from the digital files of the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Field Museum tropical research archive...
Miljohn Ruperto’s high-definition video Janus takes its name from the two-faced Roman god of duality and transitions, of beginnings and endings, gates and doorways...
Natasha Wheat’s Kerosene Triptych (2011) is composed of three images, one each from the digital files of the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Field Museum tropical research archive...
Weekly Picks: Singapore (17 - 23 September 2018) | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia Weekly To Do September 17, 2018 The Golden Record 2.0 , NUS Arts Festival 2018, 21 – 22 September 2018, University Cultural Centre Theatre At the NUS Arts Festival 2017 was staged part one of The Golden Record, inspired by the 40th anniversary of the 1977 NASA launch of Voyager I and II, the interstellar crafts that carried two ‘Golden Records’ deep into space...
Weekly Southeast Asia Radar: Hikayat Raja Babi; new media and freedom | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia ArtsEquator Radar Varuth Hirunyatheb August 6, 2020 ArtsEquator’s Southeast Asia Radar features articles and posts about arts and culture in Southeast Asia, drawn from local and regional websites and publications – aggregated content from outside sources, so we are exposed to a multitude of voices in the region...
MUM , the acronym used to title a series of Rogan’s small interventions on found magazines, stands for “Magic Unity Might,” the name of a vintage trade magic publication...
While his works can function as abstract, they are very much rooted in physicality and the possibilities that are inherent in the materials themselves...
Will Rogan’s video Eraser (2014) shows a hearse parked in a clearing amidst leaf barren trees...
In his evocative Landscape Paintings, McMillian uses second-hand bedsheets, sourced from thrift shops, as his starting point...
Miljohn Ruperto’s high-definition video Janus takes its name from the two-faced Roman god of duality and transitions, of beginnings and endings, gates and doorways...
Miljohn Ruperto’s silent video work Appearance of Isabel Rosario Cooper is an archive of ghosts...
Acting Exercise: Demon Possession is a video by Miljohn Ruperto that addresses notions of performativity, the self, and collective truth...
Podcast 50: Anna Chan, Asia Network for Dance (AND+) | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia ArtsEquator Viewpoints November 22, 2018 Duration: 36 min Chan Sze-Wei finds out more about the Asia Network for Dance (AND+) from one of its co-conveners Anna Chan, who was former head of Performing Arts and Dance for the West Kowloon Cultural District and current Dean of the School of Dance at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts...
Since the global capital expansion, billboards have been the medium of communication between the rulers and the residents of townships...