Previously Viewed

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This spring, the Contemporary Art Gallery is pleased to present Previously Viewed, a series of artist-curated film screenings. Inviting artists from CAG’s recent and upcoming programming to present films that have been formative to their thinking and practice in some way, each screening is a one-night-only event centered on a single feature-length work.

gabi dao has selected A Useful Ghost (2025).

I selected A Useful Ghost in light of Wim Wenders’ self-congratulatory statement at this year’s Berlinale that the film world should “stay out of politics.” Director Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke exemplifies how cinema can be fresh, humorous and a very necessary, contemporary political critique in our time of escalating fascism and oppression.

Steeped in a lineage of Southeast Asian ghost stories, the film's use of haunting as a form of active remembering that resists erasure resonated with me. Aspirationally rigorous in form and content, Ratchapoom skillfully crafts a story of forbidden ghost-human, cross-class romance, collusion and Thailand’s 2010 Red Shirt massacre. In this film, the real horror isn't the motley cast of possessed household electronics, but a world that forgets violent abuses of government power.

-gabi dao

Run time: 130 minutes.

RSVP

Registration for this event is encouraged; tickets are free. Secure your seat here.

Rush tickets will also be made available the day of the event, starting at 6:45pm.

Accessibility

This event will be held in CAG’s B.C. Binning Gallery, which is wheelchair accessible. Additional accessibility information can be found here. This film will be presented with closed captioning.

Biography

gabi dao’s practice is invested in how entanglements with natural and supernatural worlds shape notions of belief and belonging, frequently culminating as sculpture, installation, experimental films, collage, and scent. Through methodologies of gathering, breaking, repairing, listening, and collaboration, their practice insists on blurry temporalities, sensory affirmations and ways of knowing otherwise. Their work often begins within the slippages of “history,” archives and storytelling – towards channeling ineffable tensions between grief and joy, dissidence and complicity, disassociation and sentimentality.

dao’s work has been presented at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Vancouver Art Gallery; Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver; Radius CCA, Delft, NL; Vincom Centre for Contemporary Art, Hà Nội, VN; and the 36th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts, where they were awarded the Research Residency Award; and has been screened at e-flux Screening Room, New York; Sàn Art, Sài Gòn, VN; and numerous festivals including the BFI London Film Festival and International Film Festival Rotterdam. dao holds an MFA from Piet Zwart Institute and has been in residence at Triangle Astérides, Marseille, FR; EKWC, Oisterwijk, NL; and Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, NL. They are represented by Unit 17.