Korakrit Arunanondchai
Songs for dying

In the exhibition, Thai artist Korakrit 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. Through this video work, as well as in installation and paintings, Arunanondchai 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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Thanks to Defne Ayas, Michelangelo Corsaro, Natasha Ginwala (The 13th Gwangju Biennale); Stefanie Hessler; Olivier Babin, Jessica Kirsh, Baptiste Mano, Adrien Nuttens (C L E A R I N G New York / Brussels); Monica Reitan; Han Nefkens (Han Nefkens Foundation); Gabriella Price (Carlos/Ishikawa, London); Nunnaree Panichkul (BANGKOK CITYCITY GALLERY)

Special thanks to Norsk Mose & Design for the kind support.