Project Summary
Night Bells
Dates: September 25 - 29, 2019
Venue: Baboon House, Malacca
Artists: Shireen Seno, Sherman Ong and Lav Diaz
Curator: Gertjan Zuilhof
One of the most interesting areas in the artistic development of film is the overlap between cinema and the visual arts. Often this is approached by museums, but a presentation from within the context of a film festival can be as interesting if not more dynamic.
The festival has asked three filmmakers/artists to present a special work that fits the ideas of a short film festival in South East Asia closely. They are the master filmmaker Lav Diaz from the Philippines, also from Philippines the young woman artist/filmmaker Shireen Seno and the Malaysian/Singaporean photographer/artist/filmmaker Sherman Ong.
The idea of the exhibition is to make it a compact presentation that fits naturally in the location and atmosphere of historical Malacca and it will also be an as natural part of the festival presentation as a whole.
The exhibition will be small, with just three participants, but of the highest quality to be found in the region.
The presence of the three outstanding artists will make it possible to explain and discuss the works on the spot in an interaction with the other (international) guests and the festival audience.
Sherman Ong
Was born in 1971 and is as Malaccan as can be, coming from an old Peranakan family; first generation of Chinese immigrants to Malacca, well before the Dutch came.
Studying law at first he turned into a very versatile artist being a prize winning photographer, visual artist and filmmaker.
Sherman Ong took part in many international events and exhibitions and among many other awards he is the winner of the Prudential Eye Awards 2015 for Photography and the ICON de Martell Cordon Bleu Photography Award 2010.
His practice has always centred on the human condition and our relationships with others within the larger milieu.
Sherman Ong's Work
NUSANTARA: the seas will sing and the wind will carry us
"NUSANTARA: the seas will sing and the wind will carry us" is an allegoric work based on archipelagic Southeast Asia’s maritime past and migratory patterns – historical and modern-day – that have shaped the nature of diasporic identities in the region. Central in the work is an anthology short films from Sherman Ong’s filmography.
Told in documentary-style first-person monologues or conversational dialogues, the films relay lives caught between the cracks of interregional histories, geography and social mores.
That the documentary-style confessions in Ong’s films are fictive enactments makes a discursive point on the boundary between fact and fiction in storytelling.
Thus juxtaposed in the installation with folklores that have endured through centuries of re-telling, Ong’s stories assume the parity of parables, at once fictional yet truth-seeking.
Sherman Ong's NUSANTARA: the seas will sing and the wind will carry us
Shireen Seno
Shireen Seno is an artist and filmmaker whose work addresses memory, history, and image-making, often in relation to the idea of home. She is a 2018 recipient of the Thirteen Artists Awards from the Cultural Center of the Philippines. Her photobook Trunks has been exhibited widely and is in the collection of the Asia-Pacific Photobook Archive. Her film Big Boy (2012) won Best First Film at the Festival de Cine Lima Independiente. Her award-winning second film, Nervous Translation (2018), screened at MoMA for New Directors/New Films and at the Tate Modern as part of their Artists’ Cinema programme.
Shireen Seno (right) and partner and collaborator John Torres
Shireen Seno’s Work
A child dies, a child plays, a woman is born, a woman dies, a bird arrives, a bird flies off
I have been working on a series of studies of the migration of birds in and out of the Philippines, a kindred project to a feature-length film I’m writing called “The Wild Duck”, inspired by memories of my family’s migration to the United States in the early 2000s. The project aims to deal with migration in varied forms and times. Birds, and ducks in particular, are like role models for humans—they find ways to survive by various means across varied terrain. I hope to bring together a mix of local birds and migratory ones, migrating across different generations of moving image media.
A child dies, a child plays, a woman is born, a woman dies, a bird arrives, a bird flies off
Shireen Seno’s Work
A child dies, a child plays, a woman is born, a woman dies, a bird arrives, a bird flies off
I have been working on a series of studies of the migration of birds in and out of the Philippines, a kindred project to a feature-length film I’m writing called “The Wild Duck”, inspired by memories of my family’s migration to the United States in the early 2000s. The project aims to deal with migration in varied forms and times. Birds, and ducks in particular, are like role models for humans—they find ways to survive by various means across varied terrain. I hope to bring together a mix of local birds and migratory ones, migrating across different generations of moving image media.
Lav Diaz
Lav Diaz (Mindanao, Philippines, 1958) is at the moment one of the greatest and most famous filmmakers of Asia, but his reputation grew slowly like his long films can move slowly in time. From his first long film Batang West Side (2002) to his successful Norte, the End of History (2013) there are ten years in which his fame was built step by step with a series of films that belong to the longest and strongest in film history.
Diaz is not only active in film making. He is a (rock)musician as well and his installation in Malacca will not be his first one.
Lav Diaz in Manila pointing at Gertjan Zuilhof’s camera
Sherman Ong at The Chinese Great Wall
Night Bell Curator: Gertjan Zuilhof
I have a split personality. One side of me is a very serious and experienced film festival programmer and curator. I made programs for the Rotterdam festival for more than 25 years. I made exhibitions in Beijing and Taipei.
I started early. At 19 I was a volunteer art house programmer in my student town in Holland and now at 64 I am still and again a volunteer programmer in this nice little festival.
The other side of my personality is a playful drawer. I made drawings on a large scroll in Georgetown last year and I will go on making silly drawings till I drop.
Traveling Curator Gertjan Zuilhof
Reward Postcard #3
