esea contemporary co-presents with Queer East, ‘Counter Archives: On Acts of Resistance and Remembrance’, a film screening and workshop that explore how memories and embodied histories can act as feminist and queer forms of resistance in the face of erasure.
Silences within historical narratives are often encoded in archives, where underrepresented histories are written out and marginalised experiences omitted. Embodied experiences of gendered violence during slavery, genocide, and war remain fundamentally unrepresentable, their traces at risk of being lost from dominant narratives.
Through seven audiovisual artworks and a participatory workshop, ‘Counter Archives: On Acts of Resistance and Remembrance’ turns towards fables, land, bodies, and communities to decolonise the archive and reimagine how we might honour alternative histories beyond institutional frameworks. The programme invites audiences to engage with different ways of re-remembering and reanimating suppressed pasts through collective acts of storytelling and creation.
The screening will be followed by a workshop led by Sarah Chew and Cheryl Ho, where participants will explore collaging and zine-making as decolonial practices of re-remembering—superimposing the present onto the past to reclaim erased narratives and envision new forms of remembrance.
Booking is required as spaces are limited.
Programme:
Kidung/Lament
The spectral trace of Bali's histories of political violence continues to haunt present topographies.
Dir. Leyla Stevens | Indonesia, Australia | 2019 | 11min
The Red Chador: Genesis I
Seven performers create an intentionally colorful spectacle to reclaim the gaze of the Muslim woman.
Dir. Anida Yoeu Ali | USA | 2021 | 9min
The Altar
A buddhist fable-like story about the guilt of a childhood incident involving the killing of an ant.
Dir. Moe Myat May Zarchi | Myanmar | 2023 | 10min
Earth, Land, Sky and Sea as Palimpsest
An invitation to cross thresholds and observe the unobservable: to see with our skin, hear with our feet, and feel our way above and beneath pathless paths.
Dir. Zarina Muhammad, Zachary Chan | Singapore | 2017 | 18min
Di Mana Keluargaku Merantau
An exploration of the space connected to memory within the changing landscapes in Singapore.
Dir. Huda Osni | Singapore | 2024 | 12min
Single File
In the wake of cataclysmic regional change in Hong Kong, new realities of misinformation, digital consciousness, and cultural disappearance are reckoned with.
Dir. Simon Liu | Hong Kong | 2023 | 10min
Private View: Joshua Serafin
An honoring of tropical myth and the dreamwork of a nonbinary cosmopolis emancipated from colonial hierarchies of gender and race.
Dir. Kitty Yeung, Joshua Serafin | Philippines | 2024 | 6min
Leyla Stevens is an Australian-Balinese artist who works within a lens-based practice, informed by ongoing engagements with storied places, archives, cultural geographies, and performance lineages through a transcultural lens. She is guided by collaborative engagements with communities.
Anida Yoeu Ali is an interdisciplinary artist whose works span performance, installation, new media, public encounters, and political agitation. Born in Cambodia and raised in Chicago, she is a first-generation American of mixed Malay, Cham, Khmer, and Thai ancestries. Working transnationally, Ali investigates the artistic, spiritual, and political collisions of her diasporic, hybrid identity with the resolve that in-betweenness is a powerful space for creation and provocation.
Moe is a filmmaker, musician and a multidisciplinary artist. She loves to explore the metaphysical, identity, femininity and personal aspects through innovative use of visuals and sound. She founded the cinema magazine and organisation “3-ACT” to support cinema education in Myanmar.
Zarina Muhammad is an artist, educator and researcher, working at the intersections of performance, installation, text, ritual, sound, moving image and participatory practice.
Zachary Chan is a multimedia artist whose works reflect his composite background in visual communications, graphic design, and sonic arts.
Huda Osni is a Bawean-Singaporean multimedia artist now based in London. Passionate about exploring their ethnicity and nationality, they delve into the complexities of cultural erasure through moving images, showcasing the intersection between heritage, identity, and the visual arts.
Simon Liu (Hong Kong) is a film artist who builds a catalogue of the rapidly evolving physical, political, and emotional landscapes. His analogue-based experimental film practice comprises visual interventions in filming, chemical development, and printing processes to disrupt spatial and temporal flows, overlapping his own memories with older colonial histories against the current socio-political landscape.
Kitty Yeung is an award-winning filmmaker from Hong Kong. She is also a producer and production Manager at Nowness Asia, founder of production company Pissbaby, and co-founder of Hong Kong based art collective 135YCS.
Joshua Serafin (they/she) is a multi-disciplinary artist who combines dance, performance, visual arts, and choreography – an intense sociological exorcism of Filipino identity.
CiEn Heong (dia/they, any pronoun) is a researcher, curator, filmmaker and community organiser from Singapore, based in London. They explore themes on audiovisual politics, archives and memory, Third Cinema, and decolonial feminism through multi-disciplinary practices.
Sarah Chew (she/her) is an emerging curator and community organiser. She recently graduated from Central Saint Martins (BA (Hons) Culture, Criticism and Curation), where her research interests are Southeast Asian heritage, folklore, and feminism.
Queer East is a cross-disciplinary festival that showcases boundary-pushing LGBTQ+ cinema, live arts, and moving image work from East and Southeast Asia and its diaspora communities.