Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Class (2005) by Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook challenges the viewer’s personal sense of morality and tolerance by depicting a classroom from hell. In the video, a woman, dressed in black with a white over shirt, stands in front of a long blackboard. The classroom’s rear walls and floor are covered in taut white fabric, given the room the sinister appearance of a sanitarium or a crime scene.

Painting (Painting)

In the “Black Paintings” series, although the human body is only suggested, it plays an important role. Some body parts are absent, mostly the faces which are usually an affirmation of the individual. The characters recall ghosts testifying as to the traumas of war.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The single-channel video Myth of Modernity opens on historical representations of the universe in Thai Buddhist places of worship –pagodas, palaces and spirit houses. Denoting three cosmological worlds, the colored religious illustrations and ornate monuments are slowly replaced by images of anti-Yingluck protesters during the 2013-2014 Thai political crisis. Over the masses, a flying neon pyramid –the light sculpture Myth of Modernity – echoes the popular simplification of worship architecture into geometrical shapes.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The film Man and Gravity follows the journey of a man in an old, beaten motorcycle, struggling to transport his possessions through a mountainous landscape. At times riding swiftly and at times caught in a bind, we witness the man fighting against gravity and the roughness and irregularity of the terrain. The film draws on the artist’s own Buddhist beliefs, referencing the writings of ascetic Thai philosopher Buddhadasa Bhikkhu, who uses the concept of gravity as a metaphor for karma and destiny.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The film Demos by Danaya Chulphuthiphong draws parallels between zoo animals and humans through an assemblage of footage and images collected from various news and science websites. The soundtrack, made in collaboration with filmmaker, artist, and musician Pathompon “Mont” Tesprateep, was also sourced online and includes recordings of sounds produced in outer space, underwater, the deep jungle, as well by drones and laser beams. The film begins with the watchful eye of a semi-submerged crocodile, then shifts into an industrial scene of cranes swinging building materials across the sky.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

246247596248914102516… And then there were none narrates a semi fictional account centered around the ambiguous history of the Democracy Monument in Bangkok, and on the aftermath of the 1973 demonstration of 400,000 people who marched against the military junta from Thammasat University to the monument. Built on archival and oral history, the story interweaves the personal with grand historical narratives to consider the complicated history behind the monument – symbolic of the unrest and violence that led to the Thammasat University massacre on October 6, 1976.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The flat, wide river holds on its surface a tour-boat of memories, as Som Supaparinya documents her Grandfather’s return via cruise to familiar territories in rural Thailand that were submerged after the Thai government installed a series of dams. An unsettling sense of trauma emerges from the absence of what is being described in My Grandpa’s Route has been Forever Blocked . Supaparinya’s juxtaposition of unceasing waterways and cruise life with a series of dams, obstinately responsible for these conditions.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

A Ripe Volcano , a collaboration with Yasuhiro Morinaga, revisits two sites of violence and aggression in Thailand’s recent past: The Rattanakosin Hotel, the site where the military troops captured and tortured the civilians, students and protestors who were hiding inside the hotel during the Black May of 1992; and Ratchadamnoen Stadium, a Roman amphitheater-style Muay Thai boxing arena, which was built in 1941-45 during the Second World War and since then has become the theatrical labyrinth for more acculturated and commercially “acceptable” displays of bloodshed. The work builds around the recollections of human experiences that took place within these spaces and shifts through the mental space distilled from the possessed memory of wounded time. Within the medium of the multi-channel video/ sound installation, Sakpisit and Morinaga create dreamlike variations sprawling through darkened room where the haunting images and ambient sounds float through the space, creating an exquisitely hypnotizing experience.

Installation (Installation)

On September 22, 1940 the French signed an accord, which granted Japanese troops the right to occupy Indochina. The Japanese presence in Indochina lasted until the end of World War II and during the occupation, jute supplies from India were interrupted. Jute was used to make sacks as well as gunpowder, a crucial material for the war industry.

Photography (Photography)

The series of prints titled Mr. Shadow by Nontawat Numbenchapol engages with the history of and current state of militarization in Thailand. Each print features an invisible person, their silhouette only outlined by the military fatigues that they wear.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Invalid Throne by Jakrawal Nilthamrong is a 35mm film that searches the protagonist Kamjorn Sankwan’s memory and connection with the land he grew up in. Using Nithamrong’s cinematic language of visual representations and soundscapes without narration, he highlights a non-human-centered view to meditate upon and reveal the sublime and unspoiled natural landscape ? as Nilthamrong states: “in the middle of nature where no man has claimed ownership”.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

The Wings by Pichet Piaklin is a creation story of fragility, where the desire for freedom is mired in blood red by the inculcation of faith and violence. Piaklin was born and continues to live and work in Thailand’s deep south, a geographical area once known as the Pattani Kingdom (now the Pattani, Yala, and Narathiwat provinces), before it was annexed by the Siam Kingdom in the early 1900s. As a consequence of unreconciled historical conflict, this predominantly Muslim community continues to endure oppressive social and political conditions under the ruling Thai Buddhist monarchy.

Photography (Photography)

The series of prints titled Mr. Shadow by Nontawat Numbenchapol engages with the history of and current state of militarization in Thailand. Each print features an invisible person, their silhouette only outlined by the military fatigues that they wear.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

When Need Moves the Earth is a three-channel video that combines elements of documentary footage, archival material and abstract aerial shots to encompass a painterly yet forthright exploration of a coal mine and a water dam in Thailand. A meditation on the impact of industrialization on the natural environment, the work highlights the drastic alterations that these operations leave in its place. Som Supaparinya’s work is often a commentary on political, social, and personal issues.

Photography (Photography)

The series of prints titled Mr. Shadow by Nontawat Numbenchapol engages with the history of and current state of militarization in Thailand. Each print features an invisible person, their silhouette only outlined by the military fatigues that they wear.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Miljohn Ruperto’s silent video work Appearance of Isabel Rosario Cooper is an archive of ghosts. The video’s title figure, a Filipina actress, vaudeville dancer and singer who played racialized, peripheral roles in Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s, flits in and out of a montage of scenes. Ruperto digitally modified the 16mm film by blurring the background and all of the figures in each scene except for Cooper herself.