Southeast Asian cinema and video art are generally underrepresented
in critical writing from the region, but this writer-curator is providing crucial theorisation and contextualisation of such image-makers via text, exhibitions and other collaborations. She has written on Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Lav Diaz and Nguyen Trinh Thi through the lens of postcoloniality and local avant-garde movements, contributing to important de-Westernised histories of cinema. Started in 2019, her curatorial and publication project, Animistic Apparatus, which examines the correspondences between Southeast Asian moving images and animistic practices, had a screening at Amsterdam’s Other Futures festival this year, and while her book, Animistic Medium: Contemporary Southeast Asian Artists Moving Image, is forthcoming. Currently, she is professor of cinematic arts at the University of Westminster, where she codirects the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media. Her work in general traces the ways in which our relationship with the screen has evolved to open new potentialities for the medium.