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

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, Christchurch, New Zealand), CIRCUIT (Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Wellington, New Zealand), Composite (Naarm, Melbourne, Australia), and STORAGE (Bangkok, Thailand); 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.

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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

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Ananta Thitanat
Siam, 2024
Digital video with sound, 13:18 mins
In Siam (2024) Ananta Thitanat asks her father about the stories behind the Siam Cinema, a commercial movie theatre located in central Bangkok which was their home for much of the filmmaker’s childhood. The cinema was destroyed by fire during an anti-government Red Shirt protest in 2010. Seeking to recall and consolidate fragmented memories of her destroyed home, the filmmaker creates a series of restless drawings; on the soundtrack, we hear her father’s recollections of their time spent living together at the theatre and his co-workers’ lives also revolved around the Siam.

Ari Angkasa
Quantum Leap, 2024
Two-channel digital video with sound, 17:00 mins
Quantum Leap (2024) is made in collaboration between artist Ari Angkasa and her sister and filmmaker Serena Arsletta. A satirical remake of an airline safety video, the two-channel video combines Angkasa’s video collage and performance art practice in a film addressing the aviation industry’s role as an arm of the state in global politics. Using archival footage from the European Union’s ban on all Indonesian airlines in 2005 and the series of aviation scandals plaguing Indonesia preceding it, along with family archives on VHS, Quantum Leap sees Angkasa perform the unreliable narrator embodied in a flight attendant. With her hair in a French twist and a classic kebaya uniform cinching her waist, the artist splits into two characters who speak different languages. Moving in and out of linear narrative, synchronisation and image resolution, the work seeks to make sense of queerness, what it means to belong, and transitional dysphoria in the context of diaspora.

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Dieneke Jansen
This Housing Thing, 2021
Digital video with sound, 18:37 mins
Dieneke Jansen’s This Housing Thing (2021), a video which documents all of the houses Jansen has lived in, with commentary by the artist reflecting on conditions of inherited privilege and the shifting political contexts in which her experience of housing is embedded. Narratives from the Netherlands and New Zealand are unpacked alongside socio-political observations, and the work oscillates between subjective to ideological positions throughout a narrative that is audible, internal, and unspoken. Flipping through family photo albums and scrolling through web footage, This Housing Thing hinges on the desire for housing security and access as a human right. Why this housing thing? Looking backwards to look forwards, This Housing Thing reasserts the political and the personal as inseparable.

Kahurangiariki Smith with Buntheun Oung
Mā te Moana, 2024
Digital video with sound, 14:22 mins
A descendant of Te Arawa waka, Kahurangiariki has spent recent months learning about intersecting genealogical connections to the outer islands of Kuki ‘Āirani. Living in Rarotonga within swimming distance of where many ancestral waka departed for Aotearoa, she has been looking out to the same horizon and waters as her ancestors did. This narrative sits alongside the words of Buntheun Oung, who speaks of returning to his homeland of Cambodia. Film photographs documenting Buntheun’s journey are juxtaposed with phone footage and animated chrome-coloured kaperua and takarangi forms. Sounds of waves crashing and karaoke nights with the aunties track Kahurangi and Buntheun’s travel between Rarotonga and Cambodia. As the tides arrive and retreat, Mā te Moana is also a response to forces of push and pull.

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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.

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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.