CAMERA TRAP
(2019, black, white and colour with sound, 9:40 minutes, square dimensions, scale minimum 200x200cm)CAMERA TRAP is a comparative installation using moving images a hundred years apart. The first half of the work looks at Muybridge as both animal and landscape photographer, compared with the second half which works with current animal camera/video traps from the rainforests of Sabah (Malaysian Borneo). A visual and aural comparison of domesticated versus wild animals. Staged shooting versus remote capture. Caged sounds from the zoo versus field recordings from the rainforests.
How does the way we use camera equipment on documenting animals then and now, tell us about what we are looking for through the lens?
(In collaboration with Hutan-Kinabatangan Orang-Utan Conservation Programme based in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo, Camera Trap was produced with the support of the Smithsonian Institute fellowship and in association with the National Museum of Natural History, Washington D.C..)
2020 Oberhausen Int'l Film Festival (Competition)
2019 Berwick Film Festival (installation)
"Another transgressive experience is Camera Trap (2019) by Chris Chong Chan Fui, shown in the New Tower, a part of Berwick’s fortifications. A comparative piece, it examines Eadweard Muybridge’s images, as an animal and landscape photographer, in conversation with modern animal camera traps in the rainforest in Borneo. The film plays with ghosts of past and present via a time lapse and double-layered image of black and white shots of the creatures in the dark. The animals get closer and seem to be watching us as we are watching them, which opens a conversation about time and presence, presentation and reality."
~ (The Brooklyn Rail, Notes on Berwick: “Why this passion for pictures, why this passion for darkness?”, M. Hrdy, 2019)
"Situated deep inside the darkness of Berwick’s New Tower, Chris Chong Chan Fui’s Camera Trap (2019) also plays with its location, A video that contrasts contemporary footage of wildlife captured through ‘camera traps’ – devices triggered by movement used to monitor animal behaviours – with images made by early photographer and filmmaker Eadweard Muybridge in order to study the varying ways that animals move, it proves a transfixing experience. Though it’s simple enough in concept and execution, its various black-and-white flickers and bright-eyed nocturnal creatures evocatively illuminated the blackest corners of the cell-like cave it was installed in."
~ (British Film Institute magazine, SIGHT & SOUND, Animistic Apparatus: Cinema for the Spirits, M. Turner, Nov 2019)
"One of the most enjoyable things about the festival is its installations, placed around the town, often in spaces that are not otherwise open to the public. This was particularly effective in the case of films in the Animistic Apparatus program, such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Fireworks (Archives), Tanatchai Bandasak’s Central Region, and Chris Chong Chan Fui’s Camera Trap, which were all screened in subterranean spaces that suited their subjects. Camera Trap’s space, a cold dark room beneath a tower of the old town walls, was especially effective. The film juxtaposes two stop-motion animations of animals separated by a century: confined creatures given freedom to move by Eadweard Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope, and pictures of rainforest wildlife caught on hidden cameras that have been animated by the filmmaker. The smell of earth in the pitch black enhanced the ambiance of the piece, with the spectral infrared animals warily eyeing the audience. "
~ (Hyperallergic,Reimagining Cinema from Nature's Perspective, Ben R. Nicholson, Oct 2019)
Show Curatorial Notes