The Frame Cannot Hold the Ghosts
A screening and reading programme with Komtouch Napattalong, Kaisa Saarinen, and Bart Seng Wen Long, which extends out from the trio’s collective installation, bringing focus to their distinct yet sympathetic forms of narration and storytelling. In collaboration with the Prince Claus Fund.
Lingering within the hallowed space of the make-shift rubber tapper shelter in the main exhibition gallery, between the CRT monitor and the modern flatscreen and the stacks of anarchronistic agitprop, are persistent ghosts biding their time to re-manifest: as kinky anecdotes of a middle-aged Singaporean rubberist; a veteran camcorder on its last pixels; eccentric mythologies that have built and continue to sustain a nation’s spirit; the dreams sustained by freebleeding trees night after night.
They gather in the screening and reading programme, The Frame Cannot Hold the Ghosts, which expands on the various themes entangled within the installation, featuring three short films, an interview with a gimp, and excerpts from a hybrid nonfiction-in-progress.
Ticket: €7,50Student and solidarity ticket: €5
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Film programme
Phi Pattana / In Sum (2026), 17minsCorroded pixels struggle to form an image as they move through Cold War promises of development in rural Thailand, haunted by archival voices.
Emergencies (2025), 15 minsA Singaporean man mixes up two memories: one of a colonial-era propaganda film about communist insurgencies in rubber plantations, and another of his Malaysian ex-playmate.
No Exorcism Film (2024), 20 minsAs one robotic voice recounts nightmarish returns to Thailand, another seeks to console.
Field Interview #2 (2025), 5 minsOn the elevated walkway of Singapore’s Plantation District, a social housing estate built on top of a colonial-era rubber plantation, M. Shah hones his kickboxing drills clad in his preferred sportswear – a head-to-toe rubber suit.
All of It Transforms into Something Nobody Knows (Ongoing)Emerging from and building on an ongoing research-based art project around rubber, All of It Transformed into Something Nobody Knows is a hybrid non-fiction book that explores the material as a commodity fetish & fetish commodity.
Komtouch Napattaloong (he/him) is a visual artist and filmmaker based in Thailand. Working across experimental, documentary, and ‘“post-documentary’” cinematic forms, his practice involves identity deconstructions, migration narratives, and historical translations to examine the nature of memory, displacement, and image agency.
Kaisa Saarinen (she/her) is a Finnish researcher, poet, and novelist based in London. She writes about false dichotomies, country girls lost in the dazzle of big cities and other underdogs, strange desires and painful transformations, with particular attention to the absurd pleasures and frequent horrors of living through an ongoing apocalypse. Together with Bart Seng Wen Long, she is leading the Rubber Dreams of its Lifetime project.
Bart Seng Wen Long (he/him) is a Singaporean artist, filmmaker and curator based in London. His practice spans moving images, photography, expanded cinema and performance, revolving around confrontations between reality and fantasy, and how in the heat of such encounters, they reveal the interconnectedness of things within the political economy of desire.