Photo: Kanrapee Chokpaiboon
Spotify
Artist Korakrit Arunanondchai in conversation with Katrine Elise Agpalza Pedersen, Curator Kunsthall Trondheim
11 February Kunsthall Trondheim opened the exhibition Songs for dying – Korakrit Arunanondchai’s first solo show in Norway. In the exhibition, Arunanondchai explores the ghost as a metaphor for suppressed and overlooked histories. He looks at the official handling of traumatic and violent events and the legacy of the victims and political figures who appear just as inaccessible and elevated above the living as a ghost. In this way, Arunanondchai examines the ghost as a social, lived reality.
Arunanondchai has produced a new video work, which has its world premiere in the exhibition. The video, sharing its title with the exhibition, was commissioned by the 13th Gwangju Biennale in South Korea, Han Nefkens Foundation in Spain and Kunsthall Trondheim. As well as the ghost, the idea of the spirit medium is central in the exhibition and in the new video. This stems from Arunanondchai’s interest in the threshold between worlds, both as an idea and as something that exists in different objects and experiences.
Through the video work, as well as in installation and paintings, the artist unites the personal and intimate with the spiritual, the technological, animistic belief systems, politics and the global narrative. In the video, the idea of the ghost is active on several levels: as a presence that disintegrates the linear perception of time by making the past alive and pulsating in the present, as an alternative knowledge system, as an image of invisible structures and as a metaphor for how all things, both bodies and spirits, are interconnected as a community in a greater whole.
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Korakrit Arunanondchai designed a wearable artwork in the form of a face mask exclusively on the occasion of his exhibition at Kunsthall Trondheim. The washable mask consists of 3 layers plus insertable and exchangeable filters and meets the safety standards for covid-19 face covers, and the wearable artwork is titled If we burn, you burn with us.