“What does a legacy taste, smell, sound, feel, or look like?

“Legacies are that which we carry, sometimes with pride and sometimes with shame, as the basis of social bonding, whether as things a people embodies with pride or as an enduring pain, a burden, some kind of ghost.

“Legacies as: the pre-modern artistic, cultural, linguistic and religious heritages of the place and land that you were born into and raised in; the legacies of colonisation, and the spectres of nations and nationalisms, during and after colonialism, and their continuing shaping force; the legacies of the modern art/film histories, narratives, and ways of knowing that shaped you, and that bring an ambivalence and a desire to undo.”

Each artist in CIRCUIT’s 2022/23 programme of artist cinema commissions, Edith Amituanai, Martin Sagadin, Ukrit Sa-nguanhai, Pati Tyrell, Sriwhana Spong, was invited to make a short film articulating the artist’s own personal response to a series of propositions about potential meaning and resonance of the term “legacies” by CIRCUIT’s 2022/23 curator-at- large, Dr May Adadol Ingawanij.

Epifania (2022) by Edith Amituanai is a portrait of an inspiring young Pasifika matriarch raising her family – the rose that grew from concrete. Garden of Clay (2022) by Martin Sagadin shows an artist sculpting clay in their studio while telling stories about their predecessors, affirming the artistic process as a circular gesture, one that starts with gifting the earth. And the creeper keeps on reaching for the flame tree (2022) by Sriwhana Spon animates the insects found in the last painting by the artist’s grandfather, the Balinese painter I Gusti Made Rundu, in which the swarm imagines ancestry not as linear succession but as an accumulation of energy “charged with potentiality.” Trip After (2022) by Ukrit Sa-nguanhai is a travel vlog mapping mobile cinema screenings in Northeast Thailand during the 1960s, where the films were presented by the United States Information Service as a form of propaganda. Tulouna le Lagi (2022) by Pati Tyrell is a visual interpretation of alagaupu (proverbs) used within Samoan funeral chants and speeches, utilising imagery from the artist’s personal photographic archive.

The questions posed by Dr May Adadol Indawanij to the artists mirrored the same struggles inherent in the endeavour of bringing the exhibition White Noise to fruition. Namely, to curate from an existing collection that deals with the complexity of the histories one belongs or are tied to, whether by choice or circumstance. As the final instalment in a series of public programs conceived for White Noise, Legacies also marks the conclusion of a six-month journey of this exhibition. As the curtain draws to a close, lingering questions remain, beckoning our contemplation.

The program consists of the screening of 05 moving image works, followed by a curatorial conversation between Dr May Adadol Indawanij, Prof Tram Luong and Van Do. The program is held concurrently at Fulbright University Vietnam (HCMC) and Á Space (Hanoi).