Shot in 1878, Eadweard Muybridge's The Horse in Motion was created from a series of photographs capturing successive moments in a horse’s gallop. While drawing from pre-filmic forms of animation such as flipbooks, the series was a crucial first attempt at the photographic documentation of time. In The Horse in Motion, real time is broken down into discreet moments and then reintegrated by human perception and imagination, laying the foundation for film as a medium.

Beginning with Kim Beom’s playful take on Muybridge’s famous work, Horse Riding Horse (after Eadweard Muybridge) (2008), this programme delves into the connections and tensions between photography, film, and animation. Nalini Malani's Penelope (2012) and Shon Kim’s BOOKANIMA: Dance (2019) reflect on the significance of animation at a time when moving image has become a quotidian medium. In partnership as IKIF (Ishida Kifune Image Factory), Sonoko Ishida and Tokumitsu Kifune’s Animandala 2 (1986) extends the motion inherent in the diagrams and maps of the mandala form. Takashi Ito's Thunder (1982) reanimates a haunting Japanese building at night using stop motion, while Chang Chao-Tang’s Face in Motion (1976) presents a face hovering between subject and object. In the silent and hand-processed film The Spectre Watches Over Her (2016), Rajee Samarasinghe evokes a traditional healing ritual performed on his mother in 1960s Sri Lanka. Tomonari Nishikawa’s sound of a million insects, light of a thousand stars (2016), consisting of frames exposed to the radiated environment around Fukushima, verges on the boundary of representation itself.