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Homing Instinct
Ananta Thitanat, Ari Angkasa, Dieneke Jansen, Kahurangiariki Smith with Buntheun Oung
8 October - 2 December 2024

Tuesday, 8th October 2024
17:30 - 18:30: Join us for a conversation with Abby Cunnane, former director of The Physics Room, artist-filmmaker Ananta Thitanat, and the STORAGE team.
18:30 - 21:00: Opening Reception

Homing Instinct is a collaborative moving image project featuring artist commissions related to housing, home and belonging. It is a partnership between The Physics Room (Ōtautahi), CIRCUIT (Te Whanganui-a-Tara), Composite (Naarm), and STORAGE (Bangkok); the project will be shown at each of the sites of its three new commissions. As such, the work also shifts through states of belonging and meeting for the first time, hosting and being hosted, being located and being in transit. The first iteration of Homing Instinct was launched at The Physics Room and Enjoy Contemporary Art Space in Aotearoa, New Zealand, in July. Now, it's time for Bangkok to embrace this transformative journey.

Homing Instinct began with a conversation around housing inequalities in Aotearoa. It evolved into an exhibition project with three new moving image commissions by Ananta Thitanat, Ari Angkasa, and Kahurangiariki Smith with Buntheun Oung. These are accompanied by an existing work by Dieneke Jansen, which sparked this series of new commissions. Collectively, Homing Instinct intends to hold a metaphorical prism in front of ideas we may have about housing, home and belonging, generating more expansive conversations about identity and its connections to place.

Selected from an open call by each commissioning organisation, these works take a distinct perspective, yet the currents of identity and diaspora and reflections on family histories form points of convergence. These works have been developed with an awareness that they will move across different cultural contexts, yet arguably they each deploy strategic acts of resistance to easy consumption. The works rely on translation, nonlinear narrative logic or multiple temporalities, and as such they disrupt any expectation of seamless transition between contexts.

 


Homing Instinct is supported by Asia New Zealand Foundation Te Whītau Tūhono

STORAGE
3rd Fl. 469 Prasumen Rd, Bangkok, Thailand
Opening Hours:
14:00 - 19:00 (Thursday - Sunday)

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About the artists

Ananta Thitanat is a self-taught filmmaker and photographer with over 12 years of experience in documentary making. Ananta was born in Bangkok, Thailand and raised by a worker at Siam cinema. Ananta has participated in international forums and workshops including Docs By The Sea in Indonesia, and Yamagata Documentary Dojo in Japan. She gained recognition for her debut feature documentary, Scala (2022), which was selected for multiple international film festivals and received critical acclaim. Scala premiered at the 72nd Berlin Film Festival’s Forum section, and went on to screen at international film festivals including the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, World Film Festival of Bangkok, and Hot Docs.


Ari Angkasa is an emerging artist based in Naarm (Melbourne). Ari’s work considers the liminal voids she inhabits in transitioning and in diaspora as time-less sites of release, wherein she bends formal conventions of performance and film to the unpredictable stasis of ‘island time’. Through a conscious framing of the body as cinematic medium, Ari’s practice tracks the legacy of cultural neo-imperialism, global soft power politics and its tangential impact on the body.

Dieneke Jansen is an artist based Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, who works with lens-based documentary and social practice. Jansen’s practice engages with tensions between site-responsive interventions, performative actions and lens-based documentary practices, and works with community to productively challenge inequality. Projects such as Dwelling on the Stoep, Jakarta Biennale, 2015, and Te Wai Ngutu Kākā Gallery (then St Paul St Gallery), Tāmaki Makaurau, 2016; working with the Tāmaki Housing Group on exhibitions G.I. Areas A & B, 2015, and 90 DAYS+, 2018, Te Tuhi, Pakuranga), and Backdoor Doorbell Studio, Artspace Aotearoa, Tāmaki Makaurau, 2022, inform her current work, which focuses on the social dimensions of lens-based practice with inner-city residents in Tāmaki Makuarau.

He uri nō ngā tūpuna i heke mai ai i runga i ngā waka o Te Arawa, o Tainui, o Mataatua, o Takitimu, o Horouta hoki, Kahurangiariki Smith is a Māori artist living in Aotearoa New Zealand. In recent years Kahurangiariki has been collaborating with her māmā, Dr Aroha Yates-Smith, a leading academic on the ancient Māori feminine. Kahurangiariki’s work explores her mother’s research and the many personifications of atua wāhine (Māori goddesses). She works to manifest these atua wāhine into a physical form, locating them in the present and in our futures. Sometimes playful, sometimes cheeky, Kahurangiariki’s work explores a range of media such as moving image, karaoke, 3D rendering, video games, neon and writing. For this commission Kahurangi worked in conversation with artist and friend Buntheun Oung.

Buntheun Oung is a Khmer designer and tattoo artist. Living between Cambodia and
Aotearoa, his practice pays homage to his whakapapa of South East Asia. Through tattooing, he reaches back to ancient deities and motifs, as a medium to reconnect to the ancient past.

 

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