Curatorial Statement

Re:Frame begins from Sinophone cinema — not as a category, but as a condition: shaped by migration, translation, and the ongoing movement of identity.

Over four years, CiLENS has come to recognise through ICCW and its wider curatorial practice that the questions Sinophone cinema raises: the instability of belonging, the dislocation of language and memory, the multiplicity of cultural identity, have never belonged to the Sinophone world alone. East and Southeast Asia share deep historical entanglements: the reach of Confucian cultural traditions, centuries of Chinese migration and settlement across Southeast Asia, and the ways languages and belief systems have transformed and persisted in different soils. The questions that surface in Sinophone cinema find natural resonance across these contexts. 

Re:Frame grows from this recognition: it takes a Sinophone perspective as method, and directs it toward East Asia, Southeast Asia, and their diasporas.

Berlin is a city where multiple diasporic contexts converge. Re:Frame is grounded here, not to present a unified "Asia," but to enter the differences between and within East and Southeast Asian contexts and their diasporic experiences: the frictions, misalignments, and unfinished connections that have yet to be fully articulated.

When these differences reach each other through moving images, can the Asia we know come into sharper focus? This is not a question that demands an answer. It is the curatorial direction Re:Frame continues to unfold.

Gender, queer experience, migration, labour, the ways urbanisation and globalisation bear down on individual lives — these are longstanding curatorial concerns for CiLENS. They are not fixed themes, but ongoing conditions that shape how work is made and how it relates to the world.

Re:Frame looks for works that take shape within conditions of change — whether that change occurs in transit, or within the seeming stillness of daily life.

Re:Frame is a curatorial process as much as a platform. We care about what is selected, and equally about the conditions under which work is watched, understood, and responded to.

If your work engages with any of these questions, or with questions we haven't yet thought of, we want to see it. Re:Frame does not prescribe what work should look like. What interests us is what you are doing with moving image, and why it cannot wait.