Central Region

2019 - Film & Video (Film & Video)

18:00 mins (looped)

Tanatchai Bandasak

---

Central Region by Tanatchai Bandasak is a meditation on materiality and time-based media centres on the mysterious, prehistoric ‘standing stones’ of Hintang in Northern Laos: little-studied megaliths which have survived thousands of years of political change and the cataclysmic carpet-bombing of Laos by the United States during the Cold War. In Bandasak’s unpretentious, animist portrait of the ruins, what is remarkable is the absence of the embodied observer, instead, it is the technical parsing of the digital video camera that enlivens these prodigiously still, mute and enduring objects, through a chanceless sequence of static shots, dissolving measure and revealing gradual modulations of light. The piece evokes a spectral landscape energised by the undead and the nonhuman, opening up contemporary philosophical questions via seemingly ageless and inert artifacts.

---

Artist Tanatchai Bandasak began his career as a filmmaker, however following his studies at art school in France, he began exploring installation and sculptural strategies for presenting moving images. His recent works have demonstrated a preoccupation with time and materiality – which are hallmarks of his generation in Thailand – iterated through fine-grained sensitivity to the photomedia apparatus. Bandasak has the reflexive inclination of a media artist but this is not stylistic; rather, it comes from keen awareness that the image-making process (still or moving, by hand or by machine) is itself temporal and materially contingent. His practice is informed by a tradition of Buddhist conceptualism however this is expressed in philosophical rather than visual terms in his works.

---

Colors:

---

• temporal.a.02
• duration.n.01
• materiality.n.02
• tradition.n.01
• landscape.n.01
• nature.n.03
• territory.n.03