Film Screening, followed by Q&A: “The act of killing”

Directed by Joshua Oppenheimer 2014 BAFTA Best Documentary film, ranked one of the Top 10 films of 2013 by The Guardian, UK Duration: 115mins ‘I have not seen a film as powerful, surreal, and frightening in at least a decade… unprecedented in the history of cinema’ – Werner Herzog ‘Like all great documentaries, The Act of Killing demands another way of looking at reality. It starts as a dreamscape, an attempt to allow the perpetrators to reenact what they did, and then something truly amazing happens. The dream dissolves into...

What is an animate image?

Opening: 22.05.2014 @6:30pm Location: RMIT Saigon South campus, Melbourne Theatre 702 Nguyen Van Linh, District 7 Ho Chi Minh City   This lecture is about the poetics of mediation. It proposes a theory of the ‘animate image’ – an image that moves, that breathes, that remembers. I begin by considering the encounter between contemporary art and an older, ‘traditional’ kind of image, at an animist festival in Thailand’s northeast. The encounter serves as an entry-point into some of the challenges I have faced as a curator and a theorist, doing...

David Teh

David Teh works at the National University of Singapore in the fields of critical theory and visual culture. His research centres on contemporary art in Southeast Asia. From 2005-09, he was an independent critic and curator based in Bangkok, where his curatorial projects included Platform (The Queen’s Gallery and The Art Center, Chulalongkorn University, 2006) and The More Things Change… (5th Bangkok Experimental Film Festival, 2008). More recently David was co-curator with Gridthiya Gaweewong of Unreal Asia (55. Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Germany, 2009) and the convenor of Video Vortex #7 ...