KLEX Open Programme 3 : Me Myself Are Yours

21:00 min / sound
Jooeun Baek, South Korea

When one pronounces the word ‘archaeology,’ it feels like even the most cowardly of imagination is validated. In my childhood years, I would look for trash amidst the playgrounds to imitate being an archaeologist. As I collect the memories, dreams and fictitious stories from people and put them in a grave, the one who discovers it in the future would imagine a person’s life through those fragments. A play of one’s own, unverifiable and merely a misunderstanding. From time to time, there are people whose lives I want to approach as an archaeologist. I wish this would remind you of such people.

4:52 min / sound
Chew Win Chen, Malaysia

“天頂一粒星，地下開书斋”, (“A star in the sky, and a school beneath it”) is a children rhyme in Teochew, a Chinese dialect, that the artist vividly recalls from her late grandmother. Dialects are usually spoken among family members, but not an official language that would be taught at schools. In the video, the rhyme is recited by the artist’s cousin aunt who is in her 70s, the artist’s father in his 60s, and finally the artist herself in her 20s. According to the family, there are various versions of the rhymes, but it always starts with this same first line, “A star in the sky, and a school beneath it…”.

5:52 min / sound
Kun Liang, Taiwan/ Germany

Embarked on a short trip to Taipei, Memory Void explores sensory experience through tangible personal story that’s told or/ and retold, realised by an evening spent with storytelling among three friends from Taipei. The imagery creates nostalgic relationship between told memories and their opposite reclaimed spaces, sound and image recording are to capture what is missing, narrative becomes the most appropriate method to interpret ways humans experience the world.

4:56 min / sound
Emilia Izquierdo, United Kingdom

Ghost Dance (2019) Using as base Thomas Edison’s 1894 filming of the Sioux American Indian ‘Ghost Dance’ the piece explores dance as protest, dance as a form of resistance against injustice and the imposition of foreign powers, such as the 1894 Sioux Indian Ghost dance used as resistance against the white settlers in North America and protest dances in Gaza , South Africa, Peru, Jerusalem, Armenia among others. The piece explores power, resistance and the clash of cultures using hand drawn animation and archival footage combining this way the tactile and the digital touch exploring the cosmic, the magical, technology and politics.

10:00 min / sound
Joseph Chen King Yuen, Hong Kong

Sleeptripping Dualogy is a series of two docu-fictional travelogues, Chungking Detour and Siam Rehab, based on tours and dreams in Chongqing and Thailand respectively. The identities of both tourist and dreamer keep me in a distance with a specific time-space, and myself not being in an omniscient state. By adopting the correlative thinking model from Ancient Eastern philosophy, both Chinese and Hindu, the travelogues recognize the intersubjectivity between me, the Video-8 camera and the online found materials related to these two places; and coordinate derivatively the fictional trajectories on the intentional documentations and the intuitive imaginations.

4:00 min / sound
Sandra Araújo, Portugal

Social media platforms steal analytics & algorithmic lifestyle in tiny gifs of laugh; or how data is shaping & twisting social/ political events.

1:52 min / sound
Izzudin Bin Saedon, Malaysia

Are we given the liberty to argue or utter freely according to conscience time and space? A start of something new and unknown, might be better situation than having no options at all.

28:00 min / sound
Nguyen Trinh Thi, Vietnam

“Eleven Men” is composed of scenes from a range of Vietnamese classic narrative films featuring the same central actress, Nhu Quynh. Spanning three decades of her legendary acting career, most of the appropriated movies — from 1966 to 2000 — were produced by the state-owned Vietnam Feature Film Studio. The film’s text was adapted from “Eleven Sons”, a short story by Franz Kafka first published in 1919, which begins with a father’s declaration: “I have eleven sons”, then describes each one of them in acute and ironic detail. Transposing the father’s voice of Kafka’s story, the film begins with a woman stating: “I have eleven men”.