KORAKRIT ARUNANONDCHAI
Songs for Dying , 2021 Video installation, color, sound, 33:20 min. Whitney Museum of American Art, gift of the artist
Painting with history in a room filled with people with funny names 3 , 2015 Video installation, color, sound, 24:55 min. Courtesy the Rosenkranz Collection. Promised gift,Whitney Museum of American Art The films of Korakrit Arunanondchai form elements of a larger artistic practice in which sculpture, performance, installation, film, and painting are all interdependent and born out of each other. This interwoven practice is rooted in the polychronic cultural and spiritual belief systems and geo-political histories of Thailand, where most of the films were made. This presentation, within a specially created environment made of denim textile, includes two films, each unfolding as an epic tale told by multiple voices, in which the shaman, the ghost, the King, spirits, monks, nâgas, soldiers, family members, trees, deities, and mythical figures are all characters, woven together and transformed into one another. Painting with history in a room filled with people with funny names 3 (2015) is the third film in Arunanondchai’s ongoing Painting with History series, investigating the entanglement of spirituality, technology, nature, and memory. Shots of the film’s protagonist, a Thai denim painter played by the artist, are intercut with performance documentation, appropriated media, and drone footage. In a drone sequence filmed at Wat Rong Khun (the White Temple), one of two narrators proposes that “heaven is a simplified version of the world recorded in high definition.” Arunanondchai raises questions about the recording and dissemination of information, and the veracity of shared knowledge, especially in an era characterized by increasing nterconnectedness. Songs for Dying (2018) explores the ghost as a metaphor for suppressed histories. A personal narrative centered around the recent death of the artist’s grandfather is interwoven with the life cycle of a mythical sea turtle, the ascension of a new king, the continuing student protests in Bangkok, and the massacre of thirty thousand people during the brutally suppressed 1948 uprising against the government on the island of Jeju in South Korea. These registers of dying are gathered into a cycle of songs—”A Song for Decomposition,” “A Song for Order,” “The Shores of Security,” and “A Song for Dreaming”—that carry the idea of self and the community from the social and political realities of life in Thailand into the space of the unknowable.
Installation view: Korakrit Arunanondchai, Songs for Dying , 2021, in Mountain /Time , Aspen Art Museum, 2022. Photo: Carter Seddon
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