Alien Body, Human Dreams is a series of cinematic investigations that centre the body as a potent site of hybridity, rejecting false divisions of man/woman, human/animal/alien, and self/other to construct their own embodied and multifaceted ways of being. Artists in this programme purposefully employ queering as a technique to misread, re-appropriate, and puncture the systems of power projected onto the body. In these works by queer Southeast and East Asian filmmakers, we meet a speculative reality where human body parts are sold in food trucks and witness a dance-fight between a lion dancer and a contemporary dancer. Bodyhacking, ritualising, and ceremonialising is used to knead cosmologies, folding knowledges in upon themselves.
Curated by April Lin 林森
Presented in partnership with Queer East and Liverpool ESEA Network
Programme:
To Boyhood, I Never Knew Him
Words from a transgender man float to the surface as fleeting memories go on.
Trâm Anh Nguyễn | Canada | 2022 | 3min
Longing for the Sun to Set Upwards
An ode to the multiplicity, mutability, and expansion of what constitutes a body and a self, through imaging and technological mediations.
Jao San Pedro | Philippines | 2022 | 3min
Beast
A martial arts inspired dance-fight between a lion dancer and queer performer reflects the tension between traditional and modern identities.
Aileen Ye | Netherlands | 2022 | 6min
Disease of Manifestation
The work builds itself towards the anarchistic conditions of the inner scenes, can also be seem as a wrong-manifesto.
Tzu An Wu | Taiwan | 2011 | 9min
Yummy Body Truck
A fictional food truck selling human body parts mixed with other organisms in a biotechno-queer fantasy of interspecies mixing.
Noam Youngrak Son | Netherlands | 2021 | 7min
BXBY6.30
In this self-recorded performance blending documentary and ritual practice, a hybrid creature attempts reproduction.
Soojin Chang | UK | 2022 | 37min
Garden Amidst the Flame
A playful and imaginative fantasy that challenges the hypermasculine presentation of Minahasan ritual culture and everyday life.
Natasha Tontey | Indonesia | 2022 | 28min