The Mountain That Hid, 2022

One of the new commissions I’ve worked on this year is this short two-channel essay film for Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary‘s St_age platform.

This two-channel film is an experiment coming out of my archive of videos shot over the past decade, around my project on my family history and the anti-colonial war in what was then British Malaya — present-day Malaysia and Singapore.

It is a meditative, abstract and unresolved short essay on some broad themes in the background: anti-colonial resistance, forced migration or deportation, diaspora histories and trans-generational silences and inheritances. It contains within the strong idea that I have been grappling with of late: that there is a circularity in the way time and things happen, that history unfolds in circles rather than a straight line.

The Malayan war itself and my grandfather’s deportation by the British colonial government in 1949 — and subsequent execution — are but lurking presences in the film, like with so many other spectres colonialism has left us with.

We can only start to speak about these two, three generations on… And sometimes the speculative and fictive afford us the space of what scholar Saidiya Hartman terms “critical fabulation”, to try to fill some of those gaps, both personal and geo-political…

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This film was edited by Aacharee Ohm Ungsriwong. Producer in Singapore was Joseph Nair. With many thanks to them too!

With gratitude to the TBA21 team Soledad Gutiérrez, Jon Aranguren and Nina Speranda for the lovely collaboration and care.

Launched with the work is a conversation I did with Soledad contextualising the work, and a research bibliography. Next week, a podcast with Kathleen Elizabeth Tan discussing related themes with Malaysian novelists Tash Aw and Preeta Samarasan will be released.

Hat tip also to Ute Gwangju and NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore. And thank you Daniel Hui for the introduction to Ohm.