Songs for living

Natural Gods

It’s not non-human animals on display in Korakrit Arunanondchai’s new series — it’s nature itself. This is a nature show about the least natural thing of all: god. For the Darwinist, feelings are just an evolutionary training mechanism, a mere instinctual guide that has come to mean too much. If feelings are evolved, then they are also the voices of all who have come before us, an ancestral language far larger than any one being. There is a deep time to emotion, to our emotions towards other beings, human or otherwise. Natural Gods is a nature show beyond people. It looks at subjectivities that do not resemble our own, imagining an expansive consciousness bigger than individuals, or even entirely different from consciousness as we know it.The time after humans will leave society’s residue to be mined as if of a preternatural force for whomever or whatever comes after. It’s not cute creatures on view, it’s what seeps from spaces between symbols and language and rocks and bodies.

No History in a Room Filled with People with Funny Names 5

This film takes the rescue mission of 13 kids that were stuck in a flooded cave in Northern Thailand as a central focus to examine how the force of propaganda, spirituality, Royal History storytelling, Cold War politics in Southeast Asia and localized beliefs come together to create a new myth of representation for everyone to believe and take part in.

Unity for Nostalgia

Video installation. Commissioned by Fundação Bienal de São Paulo for the 36th Bienal.

Songs for Dying

Korakrit Arunanondchai’s new piece, Songs for Dying, composed of tropes and ideas from his “living archive,” combines the personal experience of accepting death and the perception of history with religious, technological, and political narratives. Footage of his grandfather’s funeral is followed by archival records of the popular uprising on South Korean Jeju Island, current student protests in Thailand, and references to pop culture. Using the metaphor of the ghost, central to this piece, the artist questions the linear perception of time and seeks to show how the past pulsates in the present. In his worldview, nature, people, and spirits are intertwined into a homogenous whole, forming a living and diverse reality.

With History in a Room Filled with People with Funny Names 4

Taking on a decidedly sombre tone, Thai artist Korakrit Arunanondchai tackles the difficult subject of death in this latest iteration of his multifarious series. As drones take on the role of spirits, animism and reincarnation establish a universe in which spirits and living species share the same stream of existence. A human-sized rat journeys through the rubble of global capitalism and asks himself: “Will you find beauty in this sea of data?”