The 14th Malaysian general election, was held on Wednesday, 9 May 2018, for members of the 14th Parliament of Malaysia. The election heralded the first regime change in Malaysia's history, as the former ruling Barisan Nasional (BN) coalition, which had enjoyed an uninterrupted reign over the country since Malaya's independence in 1957, was voted out of power.

 

Bisti landed in Kuala Lumpur on May 11. Taking cue from Henri Lefebvre’s bibliography on the social production and politics of space, alongside Guy Debord’s invented term “psychogeography”, she began observing and documenting the post - election landscape of KL with a drone for two consecutive months, as an artist in residence of Kuala Lumpur Film Festival.

 

The 2-channel aerial video essay goes beyond the traditional modes of seeing, experiencing and interpreting the City, its History and the spatiality of its Politics. Exclusively filmed with a drone, perspectives are twisted and multiplied, while new types of visuality arise through a disembodied and remote-controlled gaze.

 

The film can be described as an urban venture that explores and maps the modes of organisation of social and cultural life in a predominantly intuitive but also systematic fashion; it is the result of perpetual walking and motorcycling across the city. The work wishes to provide ground for a double reflection, a broadened approach towards the ways of interpreting both the subject and the object of observation. Moreover, it challenges the process of observation itself, for a more thorough understanding of our surroundings and, by extension, ourselves.

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Selected by the 39th International Festival of Films on Art (Le FIFA), for the Short Films Competition, March 16 - 28, 2021.
 

Exhibited/ screened at:

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Kuala Lumpur National Art Gallery (2018, MY)

The Zhongshan Building, Kuala Lumpur, Artist Talk & Screening (2019, MY)

"Forever more images?" Symposium - Onassis Cultural Center (2019, GR)

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Made in Kuala Lumpur, during a 10-week residency at Kuala Lumpur Architecture Festival 2018

Funded by PAM & GDP Architects. 

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