Installation

The Voice of Inconstant Savage
Commissioned for the Engawa – Japanese Contemporary Art Season programme organized by Calouste Gulbenkian Museum's Modern Art Center, The Voice of Inconstant Savage is an immersive installation that superimposes a prayer inspired by the story of a 16th-century Portuguese missionary, a chant from a Kakure-Kirishitan (hidden Christians) prayer – a religion rooted in Nagasaki Prefecture –, a chant from the Karawara spirits of the Awá indigenous people – who live in the Amazon rainforest – and a chorus of Western Gregorian chant. Morinaga questions the position of the aesthetics of inconstancy in relation to the discourse of the “savage” that modern society confronts.

Field recordings

Sombat Simla: Master Of Bamboo Mouth Organ
Simla is known in Thailand as one of the greatest living players of the khene, the ancient bamboo mouth organ particularly associated with Laos but found throughout East and Southeast Asia. His virtuosic and endlessly inventive renditions of traditional and popular songs have earned him the title ‘the god of khene’, and he is known for his innovative techniques and ability to mimic other instruments and non-musical sound, including, as a writer for the Bangkok Post describes, ‘the sound of a train journey, complete with traffic crossings and the call of barbecue chicken vendors’.

Cinema

The Mental Traveller
The Mental Traveller is a poetic reflection on the nature of remembrance. It navigates through the mental spaces of people consumed by memories of lost time.The film meditates on the passing of time, external behaviors, habitual patterns of thought and the sensorial realities of five mentally disordered men inside the psychiatric ward in Chanthaburi Province, east of Thailand, in which it is filmed. The film was conceived from the director’s connections to his parents and companions as they went through states of sickness, impending death, dementia, grief, and temporary insanity. At the same time it echoes upon the turbulent years of political upheavals and repercussions in Thailand, resulting the nation in a state of delirium, lunacy and trauma.

Performing arts

TEOAS
On 22 June 2017, the 16-year-old Junaid Khan was stabbed to death on a Mathura-bound train by a mob that allegedly mocked his skullcap and called him a beef-eater. Responding to the growing number of cases of mob lynching triggered by hate-driven communal politics in India, this work studies the actions that constitute prayer. In examining four movements — bowing, kneeling, lowering the forehead to the floor, and bringing one's palms together — 'the extremities of a surface are lines' poses questions of deference and resistance. How does the body perform its beliefs? What is the physicality of deference? What notions of space and time are embedded in the act of praying? Can deference, when performed outside its usual contexts, and repeated ceaselessly, transform into an act of resistance? How do shape, topography, orientation and horizontality inform our understanding as performers of belief? The soundscape features Junaid’s mother Saira’s testimony about her son’s death, looped and transformed into a haunting call against hate and oppression. In doing so, it references the politics of Steve Reich's 'Come Out' (1966), which loops four seconds of testimony from a wrongfully detained man in Harlem, as a potent reminder of the injustices the civil rights movement sought to address. This work stemmed out of engagements with the #NotInMyName campaign. It was briefly titled Bodies of Dissent and then presented as a work-in-progress with the title 'Pray' as part of 'Long Nights of Resistance'. The work was subsequently called 'Geometries of Faith', and then 'Geometries of Belief'. It is now titled 'the extremities of a surface are lines', in resonance with the Euclidean sense of geometry its choreographic treatment has invoked. The changing titles have had much to do with the subject of faith and belief. They cannot be defined with absolute conviction and can only ever be performed as an embodied proposition, subject to the conditions of a given time and space.

Cinema

Sekala Niskala
One day in a hospital room, 10-year-old Tantri realises she will not have much more time with her twin brother Tantra. Tantra’s brain is weakening and he has begun to lose his senses one by one. He now spends most of his time lying in bed, while Tantri has to accept the reality that she must soon face life alone. This situation opens up something in Tantri’s mind: she keeps waking up in the middle of the night from a dream and seeing Tantra. The night becomes their playground. Under the full moon, Tantri dances – about her home, about her feelings. As the moon dims and is replaced by the sun, so Tantri’s becoming a woman eclipses Tantra’s fading life. Tantri experiences a magical journey and an emotional relationship through body expressions, finding herself between reality and imagination, loss and hope.