Installation

The Voice of Inconstant Savage
Commissioned for the Engawa – Japanese Contemporary Art Season programme organized by Calouste Gulbenkian Museum's Modern Art Center, The Voice of Inconstant Savage is an immersive installation that superimposes a prayer inspired by the story of a 16th-century Portuguese missionary, a chant from a Kakure-Kirishitan (hidden Christians) prayer – a religion rooted in Nagasaki Prefecture –, a chant from the Karawara spirits of the Awá indigenous people – who live in the Amazon rainforest – and a chorus of Western Gregorian chant. Morinaga questions the position of the aesthetics of inconstancy in relation to the discourse of the “savage” that modern society confronts.

Field recordings

Sombat Simla: Master Of Bamboo Mouth Organ
Simla is known in Thailand as one of the greatest living players of the khene, the ancient bamboo mouth organ particularly associated with Laos but found throughout East and Southeast Asia. His virtuosic and endlessly inventive renditions of traditional and popular songs have earned him the title ‘the god of khene’, and he is known for his innovative techniques and ability to mimic other instruments and non-musical sound, including, as a writer for the Bangkok Post describes, ‘the sound of a train journey, complete with traffic crossings and the call of barbecue chicken vendors’.

Cinema

Five to Nine
5 to 9 comprises four short films that transpire across 5pm to 9am on the evening of the historic Brazil-Germany match at World Cup 2014, spanning intimate vignettes of unrequited love and final meetings. In China, a young migrant worker has saved 3,000 RMB to finally spend a night with a middle-aged prostitute, but she plans to leave the city the same night instead. In Singapore, a local teacher and his paramour from China are out for a rendezvous, submitting the fate of their future to the result of the football match. The Japanese counterpart centres on a porno-projectionist collecting debts from the punks for the poor. The film concludes in Thailand with the filming of the last scene of a sci-fi movie. Behind the camera, the director is suspicious of his leading actor and the actress who is also his wife.

Performing arts

TEOAS
On 22 June 2017, the 16-year-old Junaid Khan was stabbed to death on a Mathura-bound train by a mob that allegedly mocked his skullcap and called him a beef-eater. Responding to the growing number of cases of mob lynching triggered by hate-driven communal politics in India, this work studies the actions that constitute prayer. In examining four movements — bowing, kneeling, lowering the forehead to the floor, and bringing one's palms together — 'the extremities of a surface are lines' poses questions of deference and resistance. How does the body perform its beliefs? What is the physicality of deference? What notions of space and time are embedded in the act of praying? Can deference, when performed outside its usual contexts, and repeated ceaselessly, transform into an act of resistance? How do shape, topography, orientation and horizontality inform our understanding as performers of belief? The soundscape features Junaid’s mother Saira’s testimony about her son’s death, looped and transformed into a haunting call against hate and oppression. In doing so, it references the politics of Steve Reich's 'Come Out' (1966), which loops four seconds of testimony from a wrongfully detained man in Harlem, as a potent reminder of the injustices the civil rights movement sought to address. This work stemmed out of engagements with the #NotInMyName campaign. It was briefly titled Bodies of Dissent and then presented as a work-in-progress with the title 'Pray' as part of 'Long Nights of Resistance'. The work was subsequently called 'Geometries of Faith', and then 'Geometries of Belief'. It is now titled 'the extremities of a surface are lines', in resonance with the Euclidean sense of geometry its choreographic treatment has invoked. The changing titles have had much to do with the subject of faith and belief. They cannot be defined with absolute conviction and can only ever be performed as an embodied proposition, subject to the conditions of a given time and space.

Field recordings

Gong Culture of Southeast Asia「Bahnar」
The Bahnar are an ethnic group in Vietnam, living from the north to the south and northeast of the Vietnamese central highlands. Bahnar speak a language in the Mon-Khmer language group. These recordings were conducted in Dak Doa, Gia Lai Province. Bahnar people use both knobbed gongs and flat gongs; knobbed gongs mostly have a rhythmic function, the flat gongs are used for melodies. Usually a gong ensemble comprises 8 or 9 gongs in total (6 flat gongs and 2 or 3 knobbed gongs), but the number of gongs can go up to 20 (10 flat gongs, 10 knobbed gongs) or even 22 (11 flat and 11 knobbed). For this recording, the musicians brought different sorts of sharpened twig as drumsticks. the biggest knobbed gong was played by twig of jackfruits. For Bahnar people, gongs - equivalent in value to several water buffaloes - are acquired through exchanges with the people from Laos, Cambodia and nowadays with Kinh groups of Vietnam. Gong music is commonly played among the Bahnar on particular occasions such as harvesting, funeral, buffalo sacrifice, wedding ceremonies, etc.