Film & Video (Film & Video)

Produced in an interview format and as an extended chapter of Cosmic Call (2019) in the KADIST Collection, Angela Su’s True Calling by Angela Su documents the artist’s answers to a series of questions on the conception of her 2019 film that proposes speculative cosmic synchronicities for an alternative understanding of epidemics that is not built on the foundation and authority of Western medical science. Set in Hong Kong, each of the locations draw connections to places commonly tied to dominant disease outbreak narratives, such as a bustling wet market with butchers handling and selling raw meat products and the Hong Kong West Kowloon Railway Station, a cross-boundary transport terminus that sees a high traffic footprint and directly linking Hong Kong’s city center to Mainland destinations without interchange. As the artist travels around the city, she observes systems of surveillance such as police officers patrolling, security cameras, and an encircling helicopter, all playing an important role in managing the population and instating health security.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Miasma, Plants, Export Paintings is a two-channel short film by Bo Wang and his frequent collaborator Pan Lu. It takes the history of the British colonial search for tropical plants as a starting point, revealing how early colonial rule and ideologies shaped Hong Kong through the Western gaze. Through the process of transporting and collecting plants, Joseph Banks, who was the botanist and naturalist of the first British diplomatic mission to China (also known as The Macartney Embassy) and advised King George III on the Kew Royal Botanic Gardens in London with the most diverse botanical and mycological collection in the world.

Installation (Installation)

The average human has approximately 2 squared meters of skin. Deployed in space, suspended by small gold-plated chains, this skin is a recording tissue, a sensitive surface. The work is a result of a series of experiments with silicone and surfaces on which the artist transfers images.

Installation (Installation)

he woke up with seeds in his lungs by Prajakta Potnis is a set of x-ray films presented through backlit light boxes of found objects constructed to evoke the body or organs that turns the host into a foreign element. The title of the work is inspired by a story the artist came across during her research, according to which a man had swallowed seeds that started to grow inside his organs. In the work, interior scapes of the body appear as radioactive rays pass through various materials.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

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.