Legacies: Five Short Artist Films

Legacies: Five Short Artist Films
Edith Amituanai, Martin Sagadin, Ukrit Sa-nguanhai, Pati Tyrell, Sriwhana Spong
Curated by May Adadol Ingawanij, commissioned and toured by Circuit Artist Moving Image

What does a legacy taste, smell, sound, feel, or look like?

Legacies feature five short artist films for cinema commissioned by Circuit Artist Moving Image and curated by Thai/UK curator and film scholar Dr May Adadol Ingawanij. The project developed from a series of propositions put to the artists by Circuit curator-at-large Ingawanij about the potential meaning and resonance of the term ‘legacies.’ She writes:

"Legacies are that which we carry, sometimes with pride and sometimes with shame, as the basis of social bonding, whether as things a people embodies with pride or as an enduring pain, a burden, some kind of ghost.

Legacies as: the pre-modern artistic, cultural, linguistic and religious heritages of the place and land that you were born into and raised in; the legacies of colonisation, and the spectres of nations and nationalisms, during and after colonialism, and their continuing shaping force; the legacies of the modern art/film histories, narratives, and ways of knowing that shaped you, and that bring an ambivalence and a desire to undo."

Each artist was invited to make a short film which attempted to articulate the artist’s personal response to the concept. The results are inevitably various: a portrait of a young Pasifika matriarch (Edith Amituanai); a reflection on the cinematic history of Thailand (Ukrit Sa-nguanhai); an artist sculpting clay in their studio (Martin Sagadin); an animation based on a Balinese painting made by the artists grandfather (Sriwhana Spong), and a vivid interpretation of Samoan funeral chants and speeches (Pati Tyrell).

Legacies is Circuit’s seventh annual programme of Artist Cinema Commissions. It has been presented at Artspace Aotearoa, Auckland; Ashburton Gallery, Ashburton, and is touring extensively overseas, to the USA, Germany, United Kingdom, Singapore and Thailand.

The exhibition is accompanied by The Legacies Reader, a publication edited by Thomasin Sleigh, which features contributions from the artists, as well as writings by Huni Mancini, Tina Makereti, and more.

May Adadol Ingawanij is a Thai/UK curator and film scholar based at the University of Westminster in London. Her research explores histories and genealogies outside the dominant histories of the cinematic arts; particularly avant-garde practice in Southeast Asia. She was one of Circuit’s 2022 curators-at-large.