See Me, See You: Early video installation of Southeast Asia

Exhibition Catalogue

See Me, See You is the world’s first exhibition of early video installation of Southeast Asia, spanning the early 1980s to the early 1990s. This catalogue traces the journeys and evolving identities of the ten artists featured in the show and their pivotal experiments with the moving image, which incorporate readymade objects and cathode-ray tube television monitors as well as performative and participatory elements. Their artworks encapsulate the techniques and materials of their generation and mark the emergence of video installation as a form in the region.

The publication features interviews, essays, rare archival images and texts, as well as a timeline that highlights the definitive technological moments and inventions that propelled television and video in global and regional contexts.

In “A Review of See Me, See You: Early Video Installation of Southeast Asia,” Pelikula: A Journal of Philippine Cinema and Moving Image 9 (2024), Jael Mendoza writes:

“The interviews and artist writings are important in contextualising and correlating the artists’ practice, influences, and encounters with the moving image in Southeast Asia. Instead of approaching the works individually, we make sense of the proposed survey and the dialogue created among the included artist writings, the publication of which is notably spread out across periods (Manahan’s in 1982, Murti’s in 2009, Saidon’s in 2008, revised portion of Langenbach’s essay originally published in 2007, Baharudin’s and Langenbach’s artist statements for the exhibition in 2023). […] Because the exhibition/publication is one that maps out the history of early video installation in Southeast Asia, it is inevitable to pose questions concerning the politics of knowledge production, historicising, and archiving, particularly in a region whose narratives are assiduously contested, rewritten, and recuperated.”

Access the microsite here.