Film: Watch and Chill 3.0
Streaming Suspense

Can performance be a means of survival with the movement of the body deferring death? This theme introduces performances that experiment with non-normative traditions and myths in order to transcend our current time.

A Screen Test for an Adaptation of Giselle (2022)
Dir: Cecile B. Evans
8 mins, 49 secs

A Screen Test for an Adaptation of Giselle by Cécile B. Evans is a screen test for a feature length adaptation of the 19th Century Industrial-era ballet Giselle as an eco-feminist thriller. The infamous original tells the story of a fragile woman betrayed to death who rises in an afterlife propagated by a group of so-called scorned women. This adaptation is reimagined in a near-future where Giselle and her friends have moved on from a failed metropolis to her mother’s rural village to ‘reset society’.

Mortal Voice (2022)
Dir: Karina Utomo and Cūrā8
14 mins, 40 secs

Karina Utomo is a multidisciplinary artist who centres her practice around her skills as an extreme metal vocalist and composer. Mortal Voice, made in collaboration with curatorial collective Cūrā8, captures Utomo’s extra-normal voicing in a one-take. On the screen, Utomo looms in slow-motion, stretched and stoic. The guttural voice and body movements appear otherworldly as she seemingly summons the gods. Utomo’s compositional practice explores the duality of intergenerational trauma and power, and tensions between tradition and rebellion.

Ex Nilalang (Balud) (2015-16)
Dir: Club Ate (Justin Shoulder & Bhenji Ra)
18 mins, 53 secs

Ex Nilalang: from creature ~ from creation (2017)
Dir: Club Ate (Justin Shoulder & Bhenji Ra)
14 mins, 16 secs

Ex Nilalang is a body of work that uses myth as a form to explore the intersections of queer identities of the Filipino diaspora. The artists employ video as a means of telling collaborative stories – visualized as four moving portraits. Nilalang has a hybrid meaning ‘to create’ and also meaning ‘creature’. This emphasizes the nature of the work being both a transformation of existing mythologies and also the imagining of future folklore.

Verses of Filth (2021)
Dir: Naomi Rincón Gallardo
23 mins, 53 secs

A disoriented Mesoamerican deity has become a scavenger digging in the wasted land in search of residues of fragmented bodies and cultural debris. Together with a gang of vultures, she sparks a residual insurrection of a brigade of undomesticated arms and underworld creatures who reclaim to become undead in search for touch and pleasure.

A Performing by Flash, Afterimage, Velocity, and Noise (2019)
Dir: siren eun young jung
27 mins, 36 secs

A Performing by Flash, Afterimage, Velocity, and Noise portrays the on-stage performance and makeup process of Lee Deung Woo (aka Lee Ok Chun), a second-generation yeoseong gukgeuk actor and an outstanding surviving actor of the genre. The process of the aged actor putting on makeup is a process of the woman becoming a man, but the process of putting on “male-becoming makeup” on top of an aged face that has already lost most of its distinctions of biological sex is also a scene of creation of gender heterogeneity.

Deferral Theatre (2018)
Dir: siren eun young jung
35 mins, 5 secs

Deferral Theater focuses on two of the core characteristics of the yeoseong gukgeuk artform: gender and tradition. Weaving images of representation with historical materials related to yeoseong gukgeuk, the video features three female performers from different fields: Nam Eunjin (one of the last yeoseong gukgeuk performers); Park Minhee (singer of gagok, a traditional genre of Korean vocal music); and AZANGMAN (noted “drag king” performer).

I am the King (2018)
Dir: siren eun young jung
6 mins, 23 secs

Sorry, the performance will be delayed (2018)
siren eun young jung
8 minutes and 39 seconds

No longer Gagok-Beat/less (2018)
Dir: siren eun young jung
14 mins, 29 secs

I am the King is records the performance of drag king performing dressed in men’s clothes and shows three videos on a vertically long screen. Sorry, the performance will be delayed contains the performance scene of “yeoseong gukgeuk” actor Nam Eun Jin, and No longer Gagok-Beat/less contains the performance scene of Korean traditional musician Park Min-hee.

Creating dystopic fantasies, the artists in the theme Post-dystopian Worldbuilding offer counternarratives to our reality. For example, by imagining the end of the world, or one’s own death, the viewer can learn from the imagined failure and unmade mistakes and shape their own universe.

We are in Hell When We Hurt Each Other (2020)
Dir: Jacolby Satterwhite
24 mins, 22 secs

In the video the current events of our present reality permeate Satterwhite’s quasi-utopic universe. This virtual world is rooted in the expression of Satterwhite’s body movements, which are modeled and transcribed through digital bodysuits into animated fembot form. Current events permeate his virtual space that posits a post-pandemic, post-revolution world in which Black CGI female figures rooted in the artist’s body movements use ritual and movement as tools of resistance.

Words Before All Else (2022)
Dir: Skawennati
12 mins

Skawennati investigates history, the future, and change from her perspective as an urban Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) woman and as a cyberpunk avatar. Her artistic practice questions our relationships with technology and highlights Indigenous people in the future. An early adopter of cyberspace as both a location and a medium, she creates machinimas—movies made in virtual environments—as well as still images, sculpture, fashion, and performative experiences.

Metropolis (2018)
Dir: Chitra Ganesh
1 mins, 5 secs

Metropolis alludes to the painting Life Scenes of Master Shantarakshita, in the collection of the Rubin Museum, and Fritz Lang’s 1927 expressionist science fiction film of the same name. I was interested in Shantarakshita’s critical role as a translator of scriptures and an overseer of the construction of Samye, the first Tibetan monastery, after the Buddhist master Padmasambhava cleared the Tibetan plateau of troubling spirits. The narrative is structured as a progression through a series of interlocking environments, starting and ending in deep space and culminating in the apocalyptic resurrection of Maitreya. Here, the future Maitreya appears as a multi-limbed cyborg entity, constructed of hybrid elements invoking Aelita, Queen of Mars; the Futura of Lang’s Metropolis; and bronze sculptures of Maitreya in the Rubin’s collection.

Metal, Pine Tree (2023)
Dir: Jaekyung Jung
10 mins

“Metal, Pine Tree” tells the story of a small group of survivors in a post-apocalyptic city where living conditions are no longer feasible due to an unknown cause. The film sheds light on the ethical dilemmas faced by these post-apocalyptic humans as they navigate through a city that has frozen in time, with only remnants of previous civilizations left behind.

Belated Bosal (2019)
Park Chan-kyong
55 mins

Park Chan-Kyong’s otherworldly film Belated Bosal primarily follows two women as they navigate their way up a spectral mountain and through what appears to be a history museum or nuclear disaster bunker. They converge to jointly perform a funeral rite in a shipping container, which a group of artisans temporarily convert into a makeshift Buddhist temple, replete with traditional paintings. Shot in crisp and densely detailed black-and-white negative, each frame is lit by the format’s spooky incandescence: shadows are white and the sun is black, as if the world were being viewed through X-ray, infrared camera or a plutonium-sensitive film.