My video “Requiem” is showing in the “Disobedience Archive” group exhibition, part of the main show at the 60th Venice Biennale (20 April – 24 Nov 2024).
Curated by Marco Scotini, assistant curator Arnold Braho.
Requiem, 2017
from “One Day We’ll Understand”, 2015-on-going
Single-channel video and sound installation, 16:9, sound, colour
Duration: 06:08 mins
Requiem depicts now-elderly former communists reclaiming memories of their political participation, war, deportation, exile and socialist dreams, in the form of song. In their youth, they were guerilla fighters who took on the British in the jungles of Malaya (present-day Malaysia and Singapore) in the anti-colonial war of 1948-1960. In poignant moments, the veterans struggle to remember lines from the global socialist anthem they sang daily 70 years ago, the Internationale — which their death row comrades had sang in defiance as they were marched to the noose to be hanged. Goodbye Malaya, composed and scored by a pair of Malayan communists in 1941, was belted out en masse on the decks of the ship as the leftists were deported from their home land, and in many cases, country of birth. Over 30,000 Malayan leftists — including the artist’s paternal grandfather — were deported by the British to China during the so-called “Malayan Emergency” (1948-1960), a war that followed Britain’s rule in Palestine and preceded America’s war in Vietnam in important ways. Their stories are largely missing in the historiography of this war — the longest the British fought post-World War II. Like memory itself, their voices are sometimes fragile, fallible, but also resilient.
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The “Disobedience Archive” is a 20-year project by Marco Scotini to collect films that have a political and activistic purpose. It is showing for the first time at the Venice Biennale. The whole installation, in a beautiful structure inspired by a zoetrope, is in the second room of the Arsenale.
Photo credits: NABA and SCY
Participating artists in the Disobedience Archive at Venice Biennale:
Marco Scotini con Ursula Biemann, Black Audio Film Collective, Seba Calfuqueo, Simone Cangelosi, Cinéastes Pour Les Sans-Papiers, Critical Art Ensemble, Snow Hnin Ei Hlaing, Marcelo Expósito with Nuria Vila, Maria Galindo & Mujeres Creando, Barbara Hammer, Mixrice, Khaled Jarrar, Sara Jordenö, Bani Khoshnoudi, Maria Kourkouta & Niki Giannari, Pedro Lemebel, Liminal & Border Forensics (Lorenzo Pezzani, Jack Isles, Giovanna Reder, Stanislas Michel, Chiara Denaro, Alagie Jinkang, Charles Heller, Kiri Santer, Svitlana Lavrenchuk, Luca Obertüfer), Angela Melitopoulos, Jota Mombaça, Carlos Motta, Zanele Muholi, Pinar Öğrenci, Daniela Ortiz, Thunska Pansittivorakul, Anand Patwardhan, Pilot Tv Collective, Queerocracy, Oliver Ressler and Zanny Begg, Carole Roussopoulos, Güliz Sağlam, Irwan Ahmett & Tita Salina, Tejal Shah, Chi Yin Sim, Hito Steyerl, Sweatmother, Raphaël Grisey and Bouba Touré, Nguyễn Trinh Thi, James Wentzy, Želimir Žilnik
Biennale Arte 2024 | Disobedience Archive
Marco Scotini con Ursula Biemann, Black Audio Film Collective, Seba Calfuqueo, Simone Cangelosi, Cinéastes Pour Les Sans-Papiers, Critical Art Ensemble, Snow Hnin Ei Hlaing, Marcelo Expósito with Nuria Vila, Maria Galindo & Mujeres Creando, Barbara Hammer, Mixrice, Khaled Jarrar, Sara Jordenö, Bani Khoshnoudi, Maria Kourkouta & Niki Giannari, Pedro Lemebel,