معرفی
May Adadol Ingawanij is Professor of Cinematic Arts and Co-director of the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media at the University of Westminster. Her work centers on Southeast Asian contemporary art, de-westernised histories of cinematic arts, and avant-garde legacies in Southeast Asia. She is recognized for developing decolonial methods for studying cinematic and artistic practices situated in and related to Southeast Asia, with particular focus on artists' moving image.
Her major research themes intersect film and media studies, art history, curatorial practice, and area studies. Ingawanij's work creatively develops decolonial methods for studying histories and genealogies of cinematic and artistic practices. She places contemporary Southeast Asian artists' moving image in constellation with the region's itinerant film projection rituals performed as offerings to powerful spirits of local territories. Her research explores the cosmological, agential, and relational characteristics of Southeast Asian artists' moving image.
Ingawanij's publications and curatorial projects reveal emerging trends in Southeast Asian artistic practices that fabulate temporally heterogeneous worlds enlivened by beings of the deep past, the undead, spirits, and mythical creatures. Her work examines how such practices entangle with failures and aftermath of the region's historical vanguardism while exploring what art can do and not-do in contemporary contexts.
- ArtReview's 2021 Power 100 list
- British Academy Mid Career Fellowship (2018-19)
- Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship (2009-2012)
- Multiple British Academy and Asia-Europe Foundation grants
As an academic and curator, Ingawanij prioritizes supporting creative processes of filmmakers and artists working in fragile and at-risk artistic infrastructures. She has been developing a large-scale, multi-strand research initiative on speculative practices of future-making involving film and moving image creation and circulation, with strands addressing climate change and visions of Asian film futures. She serves on the Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival Board of Trustees and regularly contributes to international academic and arts institutions.
Her current major project Animistic Apparatus conceptualizes Southeast Asian artists' moving image as practices that make animistic medium within circuits of global contemporary art, exploring the entanglement of historical vanguardism and contemporary art through the lens of regional animism.
