Public Programs @ the Institute
Series: Linda Nochlin Lecture
May Adadol Ingawanij
A City Fluctuates, A Swarm Echoes: Rhythm and Southeast Asian Contemporary Artist Cinema
Tuesday, November 18, 2025, 6:00pm
The Institute of Fine Arts is pleased to present the 2025 Linda Nochlin Lecture in honor of Linda Nochlin (1931–2017), who was a trailblazing feminist art historian and the Lila Acheson Wallace Professor of Modern Art at the Institute. This event features May Adadol Ingawanij, Professor of Cinematic Arts and Co-director of the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media, University of Westminster. Her lecture is titled “A City Fluctuates, A Swarm Echoes: Rhythm and Southeast Asian Contemporary Artist Cinema.” A reception will follow.
How to sense, speak of, and think with flux, intensity, and duration in artist cinema? This lecture foregrounds a constellation of moving image works by Lucy Davis and her collaborative Migrant Ecologies Project (MEP), Sasithorn Ariyavicha, Sriwhana Spong, Anocha Suwichakornpong, Thao Nguyen Phan, and Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook to think about animistic poetics of relations, becoming, and historical entanglement. Considering the forms and values of rhythmic indeterminacy in Southeast Asian contemporary artist cinema requires attending to structural conditions of circulation and discourse in the acutely contradictory field of global contemporary art, including the emergence of ecological aesthetics and the ways these artists’ works circulate within categories of “artist cinema,” the “Southeast Asian contemporary artist,” and the “woman artist.” Highlighting vulnerability, asymmetry, and other forms ill-aligned with masculinist histories of revolution, lineage, and vanguardism, the lecture proposes a definition of Southeast Asian contemporary artist cinema as an institutionally dependent poetics of relations, futuristic returns, and openness toward the unknown.
Prof. Dr. May Adadol Ingawanij ศ. ดร. เม อาดาดล อิงคะวณิช is Professor of Cinematic Arts and Co-director of the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media, University of Westminster. Her writings and curatorial projects concern Southeast Asian contemporary art, artist cinema, avant-garde legacies in Southeast Asia, and forms of future-making in global majority artistic and curatorial practices. Working across Thai, English, and in translation, she has written about such artists as Anocha Suwichakornpong, Araya Rasdjamrearnsook, Nguyen Trinh Thi, Lav Diaz, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Ho Tzu Nyen, Korakrit Arunanondchai, Chris Zhongtian Yuan and Sorawit Songsataya. Her criticism and essays have appeared in New Left Review, Screen, Southeast of Now and Afterall, among others, and she is at work on a book titled Animistic Poetics: Southeast Asian Contemporary Artist Cinema. Recent and ongoing curatorial projects include To Commune, whose first iteration took place in collaboration with the 69th Flaherty Film Seminar and the Thai Film Archive (2024); LEGACIES (2022-24); and Animistic Apparatus (2019 - ).
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