Depicting the other with truth and sincerity is a difficult undertaking, whether within the institutional context of a museum or on film. Attempts to grasp the essential nature of culturally and spiritually foreign works of art risk exoticisation and misinterpretation. Yet, this risk must be taken to understand the complexity of global art history. Artists and filmmakers throughout the last century have overcome the limiting discourses of nationalism, representation, and identity by practising their own forms of institutional critique. The moving image as a medium lends itself to activations of objects in space and time, renewing seemingly immutable sculptures and reviving their spiritual essence.

’Encountering Difference’ opens with Statues Also Die (1953), a pathbreaking essay film by Chris Marker and Alain Resnais, commissioned by the pan-African cultural magazine Présence africaine. Originally planned as a documentary on African sculpture, the film turned into criticism of colonialism in which the filmmakers question the historical and contemporary European perception of the works. Marker and Resnais stress how statues lose their original significance once transferred to a museum, functioning as objects of spiritual practice and cult.

Isaac Julien’s Baltimore (2002) appropriates the style, language, and iconography of blaxploitation films, a genre that featured black actors to appeal to urban audiences in the 1970s. Set across three Baltimore institutions—the Walters Art Museum, the Contemporary Museum, and the Great Blacks in Wax Museum—Baltimore stars veteran black actor and director Melvin Van Peebles. Ironic and funky, nostalgic and futuristic, the video depicts the museum as a space of marginalised racial and queer identities.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Fireworks (Archive) (2014) explores Thai politics, memory, and the malleable nature of history using pyrotechnics. Filmed at the Sal Keoku Temple in northern Thailand, the video presents nocturnal images of animal sculptures which, when illuminated by flashes of light, convey the spirit behind recent revolts. The spectral figures of Weerasethakul's actors pass through and blend in with the sculptures. Memento mori, personal politics, and cultural memory converge to commemorate the land's destruction and liberation to haunting and explosive effects.