ART CITIES: Stockholm-Korakrit Arunanondchai

A visual artist, filmmaker and storyteller, Korakrit Arunanondchai employs his versatile practice to tell stories embedded in cultural transplantation and hybridity. His body of work merges fiction with poetry and offers synesthetic experiences engaged in a multitude of subjects primarily based on lives of family, friends, and colleagues as much as local myths. Surpassing a solitary artist, Arunanondchai is an avid collaborator who has worked on videos, performances and music together with an extensive list of people.

By Efi Mchalarou
Photo: Modena Museet Archive

Korakrit Arunanondchai was born in Bangkok in 1986, but after studying in the USA, he now divides his time between the city of his birth and New York. His distinctive combination of various mediums and techniques as well as his collaborative practice have attracted international attention during recent years. In the exhibition “From dying to living”, Korakrit Arunanondchai explores the threshold between life and death, as a space where new possibilities can be imagined, involving the individual and the collective. On show are a number of new works in immersive settings, by an artist who can rightly call himself a storyteller. His practice addresses issues of inbetweenness and dissolved identity with regard to generation, gender and nationality. Animism, natural sciences, philosophy and poetry also play an important role in Arunanondchai’s art, where the power of storytelling is at the core, and the boundary between the personal, the spiritual and the geopolitical is blurred. Arunanondchai also repeatedly sources material and ideas from conflicts in contemporary Thailand and portrays corrupt belief systems and propaganda from the Cold War in South-East Asia. He interweaves these themes with his own life and family history. Dualities (life and death, past and present, dream and reality, fiction and documentary, reflection and rapture, man and machine, individualism and interconnectedness) and the shifting boundaries between these polarities are recurring themes in the work of Arunanondchai. And, in similar fashion, he alludes to the fluidity of categories such as nationality, language, gender and generation. Arunanondchai’s work is a hybridised form of documentary, film, installation, performance, painting and sculpture in large-scale settings that make use of sound, light and darkness. Paintings expand into murals; video projections reflect onto water and sweep across the room. His productions evolve horizontally in serial projects, where every idea, each individual expression unfurls seamlessly into the next, regardless of material and medium. In a specific undertaking for Moderna Museet the artist explores the threshold between the world of form and the realm of formlessness in a new artwork “From dying to living”. This project is based on two video works that constitute each other’s direct antithesis in the exhibition. “Songs for dying” (2021) conflates 2020’s violent popular protests for democratic reform in Thailand with a massacre committed in South Korea in the shadow of the Cold War in 1948. However, the artist’s own personal farewell to his grandfather serves as the link that binds these two narratives together in an intimate connection. “Songs for living” (2021) raises questions about affinity and reconciliation with a higher power, in a narrative underpinned by songs and words borrowed from French poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant, Polish author and Nobel Prize laureate Czesław Miłosz, and French philosopher, mystic and activist Simone Weil. The artist’s video works are interlaced with links to the primeval art of storytelling, where the tale being told and the location of its telling have the power to transform the collective mind and change our human understanding of existence. The artist’s video works are interlaced with links to the primeval art of storytelling, where the tale being told and the location of its telling have the power to transform the collective mind and change our human understanding of existence. Interspersed into the works are ghosts, which here serve as a metaphor for repressed trauma and suppressed memories from the past. The artist takes on the role of shaman, our guide in the transition between past and present, life and death. Arunanondchai’s work raises questions, not only from the perspective of a ritualistic worldview, but also in terms of our own time’s awareness of the dramatic impact that humankind is having on climate and the environment. All sentient beings and every occurrence in the universe are inextricably linked and mutually dependent on one another.

Photo: Korakrit Arunanondchai & Alex Gvojic, From “Songs for Living “, 2021 Still image from HD Video: Korakrit Arunanondchai & Alex Gvojic. Courtesy of the artists and Bangkok CityCity Gallery, Bangkok, Carlos/Ishikawa, London, C L E A R I N G, New York/Brussels, Kukje Gallery, Seoul/Busan

Info: Curator: Lena Essling, Moderna Museet, Skeppsholmen, Stockholm, Sweden, Duration: 17/9/2022-9/4/2023, Days & Hours: Tue & Fri, Wed-Thu & Sat-Sun 10:00-18:00, www.modernamuseet.se/