Projections #14: LEGACIES x May Adadol Ingawanij

Join us at Art Gallery Cinema for a screening of five new moving image works by Edith Amituanai, Martin Sagadin, Ukrit Sa-nguanhai, Pati Tyrell and Sriwhana Spong.

Each artist was invited to make a short film articulating their own personal response to a series of propositions posed by curator May Adadol Ingawanij:

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

LEGACIES  was first presented as a partnership between Storage Art Space, in Bangkok, Thailand and CIRCUIT in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand in 2023. The program is CIRCUIT’s seventh annual series of artist cinema commissions.

Dr May Adadol Ingawanij is a Thai/UK curator and film scholar based at the University of Westminster in London, who was one of CIRCUIT’s 2022 curators-at-large. Her research explores histories and genealogies outside the dominant histories of cinematic arts; particularly avant-garde practice in Southeast Asia.

Films

Edith Amituanai, Epifania (2022) 
A portrait of an inspiring young Pasifika matriarch raising her family; Epifania, the rose that grew from concrete.

Martin Sagadin, Garden of clay (2022) 
An artist sculpts clay in their studio while telling stories about their predecessors. The work affirms the artistic process as a circular gesture, one that starts with gifting the earth.

Sriwhana Spong, And the creeper keeps on reaching for the flame tree  (2022) 
This film animates the insects found in the last painting by the artist’s grandfather, the Balinese painter I Gusti Made Rundu. The swarm imagines ancestry not as linear succession but as an accumulation of energy “charged with potentiality.”

Ukrit Sa-nguanhai, Trip after (2022) 
A travel vlog mapping mobile cinema screenings in Northeast Thailand during the 1960s. The films were presented by the United States Information Service as a form of propaganda.

Pati Tyrell, Tulouna le lagi (2022) 
A visual interpretation of alagaupu (proverbs) used within Samoan funeral chants and speeches, utilising imagery from the artist’s personal photographic archive.

The works screened at the Art Gallery of New South Wales on Saturday 30 March 2024 as part of the Sydney Asian Art Series 2024, a collaboration between the Power Institute and VisAsia at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.