jengkuan      (2023)

jengkuan      (2023)

4K video with sound
Duration: 15 mins 50 secs

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jengkuan (as low res, on Vimeo).

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In jengkuan, Chodzko explores a process of trying to remember an experience of a series of encounters that take place in Malaysia, as an attempt to connect with a sense of its highly complex, fluid and diverse realities.  Made in the UK, shortly before his first visit to the country, Chodzko’s narration and its flow of images is structured as though trying to recollect a past event; the erratic telling of a recent, but half-remembered, dream to a friend. Yet it is staged as a future event; a premonition of Chodzko’s immanent encounter with the realities of that culture.

In the dream I knew nothing.
There was a space. An emptiness.
But the first part that I’m able
to remember more clearly
is that we had arrived at an old, empty house
that sat in the very centre of the city.

[excerpts from jengkuan’s intertitles]

Using scans from a collection of 35mm slides that Chodzko found near to his home in Kent, England, they show amateur photographic documentation of Kuala Lumpur (and other Malaysian sites) taken between the 1960’s and 1980’s, by an unknown (but probably British) visitor to the country.  As well as distinctly generic touristic images the original photos also reveal their author as extractive speculator, fascinated with recording drainage ditches, property developments and the interiors of office buildings.   The images collectively document a time of accelerated transformation of the urban development of Kuala Lumpur and in Malaysian society as a whole.

Now incorporated into a moving image work by Chodzko these pictures are repurposed within multiple layers of perception. ‘jengkuan’ is an act of restitution of these photographs, back to the culture where they were taken (from), while still somehow suspending them within a British lens, through the ‘baggage’ of Chodzko’s own cultural identity. They are grounded in someone else’s perception – the original photographer’s – as record of actuality, now as memory, suspended in celluloid as image. Then, through a passage of time and a displacement of ‘ownership’ these images become transferred into the consciousness and unconscious mind of the artist. And finally through their mediation (slipping into ‘dream’ state) they become transferred into the consciousness and unconscious mind of the viewer.  The 35mm slide images are, in their original and subsequent states, quite literally a projection onto a place and people and each image produces a particular atmosphere and an emotional response. In jengkuan, Chodzko, as outsider to Malaysian culture, is actively and inadvertently mistranslating, misinterpreting, misplacing and confusing the actual temporal order and spatial relationships of what is seen, in order to create speculative (mis)understandings which generate the particular weave of this archive as imaginative dreamwork.  And who knows, these speculative leaps may even land on truths for the viewer.

A calendar on the wall says it is 1974 which is,
obviously, a few years in the future from now.
We put the lens cap down on the notepad.
In our in-tray there is a gift we’ve wrapped in purple
to give to our friend’s children. 

          [excerpts from jengkuan’s intertitles]

Through intertitles a narrator recounts their fragmented memory of last night’s dream which seems to be set in a decaying house in the centre of Kuala Lumpur. The recurring imagery of woven rattan in cyclical motion and the sound of a spinning wheel connects the occurrence of the dream imagery with the structure of a basket, and a trap**; different structures of containment.  It relates their architecture to that of the loom and slide projector, paralleling these forms as understandings of consciousness.  As with much of Chodzko’s work Jengkuan, as well as unfolding a visual sequence to the viewer also both frames and yet destabilises this vision by including a form of often overtly dubious ‘guidance’ for what is being presented; the narrator acting as an image moderator.

Jengkuan means scope (Javanese) or reach (Malay). The jengkuan is the spool holding the weft thread.   It is a shuttle, a vehicle which weaves a line creating pattern. Dreams are structured through scope (meaning ‘extent’ but also ‘scan’ or ‘look deeply’) and reach (between differences within memory, something dreaming activates).  In relation to the wider exhibition it was originally created for*, Chodzko sees the jengkuan is the act of perceiving, or remembering, within consciousness. The jengkuan inhabits the process of dreaming in its present moment of unfolding and creating.

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Credits:
Additional field recordings from:
Ng Yi Kee  (Im_Ikki)  – Soundwalk Field Notes 1 & 2.

Excerpts of music from:
Shaman Song Of The Jah Hut from ‘The Senoi Of Malacca – An Anthology of South-East Asian Music’  (1963)
Label: Bärenreiter-Musicaphon – BM 30 L 2561
Perila – This Story Doesn’t Make Any Sense (2021). 7.37/2.11

And thank you to all the unknown people in the images, and the unknown photographer who took these images.

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*Jengkuan was originally made for the solo exhibition “But as we looked it suddenly began to change” which took place at Wei-Ling Contemporary gallery in Kuala Lumpur, May 2023.  In collaboration with gallery director, Wei-Ling Lim, the exhibition and its wider research project was supported by an award by the British Council’s Connections Through Culture. (Connections Through Culture is British Council’s arts collaboration and mobility grant, a programme to seed cultural exchanges between the United Kingdom and Southeast Asia).

** Chodzko recorded the imagery of a spinning rattan fish trap from Sarawak, (along with a basket) as representing a weave of dreaming consciousness being spun into words by the waking self.

…fish traps are usually set after dark…Among the Melanau, the fish trap has one non-functional use in funerary rites. At a ceremony farewelling the deceased’s spirit, some time after the funeral, a fish trap has to be danced with all night until it disintegrates. As it has to be a stolen object, owners of a dilapidated trap may conveniently leave it lying outside the house if they know their neighbours are in ritual need of one.
Heidi Munan, in Sarawak Crafts: Methods, Materials, and Motifs, published by Oxford University Press (1988).