Homing Instinct

Homing Instinct is a film project developed in partnership between Composite, Naarm; Storage Art Space, Bangkok; CIRCUIT, Te Whanganui-a-Tara, and The Physics Room, Ōtautahi, with each organisation taking responsibility for a new commission developed in their local context. The new works by  Ari Angkasa, Ananta Thitinat and Kahurangiariki Smith will be joined by Aotearoa based artist Dieneke Jansen’s This Housing Thing, 2021, a work and practice which sparked this series of new commissions related to home, shelter, and belonging.

Homing Instinct is a response to living in a time that requires not only redress of housing inequalities, but more expansive conceptions of housing-shelter-belonging. As increasing numbers of people are displaced through social and environmental forces, the exchange of stories around housing and home is both politically and personally necessary. As a whole, the project intends to foreground empathetic, courageous works about what home and belonging means in our respective contexts, and to assert the role of embodied, spiritual and psychological experience within any discussion of housing.

The three new commissions were selected following an open call, by a curatorial panel: Mary Pansanga, Sathit Sattarasart, Channon Goodwin, Mark Williams and Abby Cunnane. The public launch will take place in Ōtautahi Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand, in 2024, followed by screenings across the other commissioning sites: Composite, Naarm Melbourne; Storage Art Space, Bangkok, and will be available to tour subsequently.

Ari Angkasa is an emerging artist based in Naarm (Melbourne). Ari’s work considers the liminal voids she inhabits in transitioning and in diaspora as time-less sites of release, wherein she bends formal conventions of performance and film to the unpredictable stasis of 'island time'. Through a conscious framing of the body as cinematic medium, Ari’s practice tracks the legacy of cultural neo-imperialism, global soft power politics and its tangential impact on the body.

Ananta Thitanat is a self-taught filmmaker and photographer with over 12 years of experience in documentary making. Ananta was born in Bangkok, Thailand and raised by a worker at Siam cinema. Ananta has participated in international forums and workshops including Docs By The Sea in Indonesia, and Yamagata Documentary Dojo in Japan. She gained recognition for her debut feature documentary, Scala (2022), which was selected for multiple international film festivals and received critical acclaim. Scala premiered at the 72nd Berlin Film Festival's Forum section, and went on to screen at international film festivals including the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, World Film Festival of Bangkok, and Hot Docs.

He uri nō ngā tūpuna i heke mai ai i runga i ngā waka o Te Arawa, o Tainui, o Mataatua, o Takitimu, o Horouta hoki, Kahurangiariki Smith is a Māori artist living in Aotearoa New Zealand. In recent years Kahurangiariki has been collaborating with her māmā, Dr Aroha Yates-Smith, a leading academic on the ancient Māori feminine. Kahurangiariki’s work explores her mother’s research and the many personifications of atua wāhine (Māori goddesses). She works to manifest these atua wāhine into a physical form, locating them in the present and in our futures. Sometimes playful, sometimes cheeky, Kahurangiariki’s work explores a range of media such as moving image, karaoke, 3D rendering, video games, neon and writing.

Dieneke Jansen is an artist based Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, who works with lens-based documentary and social practice. Jansen's practice engages with tensions between site-responsive interventions, performative actions and lens-based documentary practices, and works with community to productively challenge inequality. Projects such as Dwelling on the Stoep, Jakarta Biennale, 2015, and Te Wai Ngutu Kākā Gallery (then St Paul St Gallery), Tāmaki Makaurau, 2016; working with the Tāmaki Housing Group on exhibitions G.I. Areas A & B, 2015, and 90 DAYS+, 2018, Te Tuhi, Pakuranga), and Backdoor Doorbell Studio, Artspace Aotearoa, Tāmaki Makaurau, 2022, inform her current work, which focuses on the social dimensions of lens-based practice with inner-city residents in Tāmaki Makuarau.