Counter Archives: On Acts of Resistance and Remembrance

Festival 2025

ExpandedPay What You CanWorkshop

Curated by
CiEn Heong, Sarah Chew

Running time
120 mins

ExpandedPay What You CanWorkshop

How do memories and embodied histories serve as acts of feminist and queer resistance in the face of erasure?

Silences in historical narratives are encoded in archives, where underrepresented histories are written out. Embodied experiences of gendered violence during slavery, genocide, and war remain fundamentally unrepresentable. These histories are thus at risk of erasure from dominant narratives and memories. By turning towards fables, land, bodies, and communities, we can decolonise archives and look for different ways of honouring alternative histories beyond institutions.

Including 7 audiovisual artworks, archive displays, and a workshop, this event explores what it means to re-remember history.

Tickets

6 May 2025, 7:00 PM

Tickets available

ESEA Community Centre

Kidung/Lament

2019

Directed by
Leyla Stevens

Running time
11 mins

In response to an unacknowledged mass grave site from Indonesia’s 1965-66 genocide, Leyla frames a video performance by poet and performance artist, Cok Sawitri, who chants a lament for the missing dead. It draws visibility to points of erasure in the landscape, where histories of violence register as gaps, fragments...

The Red Chador: Genesis I

2021

Directed by
Anida Yoeu Ali

Running time
9 mins

The Red Chador takes this rainbow path back to re-engage in a living dialogue on Islamophobia, queer identities, and otherness. This new iteration finds The Red Chador surrounded by a protective circle of six other performers, each cloaked in a unique long sequin chador. Together all seven performers or chadoras create...

The Alter

2023

Directed by
Moe Myat May Zarchi

Running time
10 mins

A Buddhist fable-like story about the guilt of a childhood incident of killing an ant while washing hands in the sink. Animated through photographic sequences painted with golds and greys, the Zen-like visuals sweep into one another with whispering monologues and glitching noises reflecting the realms of cosmos, power,...

Earth, Land, Sky and Sea as Palimpsest

2017

Directed by
Zarina Muhammad & Zachary Chan

Running time
18 mins

Wandering is interspersed with historical forays into ways in which human activities unfold and affect the earth. Engaging with environmental histories, extractive capitalist urbanisation, and archival fragments in order to redraw hegemonic cartographies and seek out a more-than-human understanding of our place in the ...

Di Mana Keluargaku Merantau

2024

Directed by
Huda Osni

Running time
12 mins

Tracing the generational history from being a local in a rural village in Bawean Island to migrating to the constantly developing and heavily urbanised land of Singapore (from a village to a concrete jungle in the past 60 years), these changes have resulted in Huda Osni’s Bawean diasporic status.

Single File

2023

Directed by
Simon Liu

Running time
10 mins

A psychogeographic sensory bombardment where the struggle for personal expression increasingly clashes with the dark forces of censorship. In the wake of recent political protests, Liu demonstrates with formal experimentations while exploring the borderlands of a new reality of misinformation and civil disobedience. NB...

VOID

2024

Directed by
Kitty Yeung, Joshua Serafin

Running time
6 mins

For the “Cosmological Gangbang” series, Serafin explores the multiplicities that emerge when probing historical iconographies and imperial ideologies that remain normalised within postcolonial societies. Filmed in the province of La Union in the Philippines, this episode expands upon Serafin’s broader artistic pr...

Curator Biography

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.