Space-Body Entanglement: Thai artists' video

Space-Body Entanglement is a programme of contemporary artists' film and video from Thailand, selected by Bangkok-based curator Mary Pansanga. It features work by Jeanne Penjan Lassus, Pam Virada, Saroot Supasuthivech, Tulapop Saenjaroen, Korakrit Arunanondchai & Alex Gvojic (with Tosh Basco), and Pathompon Mont Tesprateep.

Space-Body Entanglement explores the interplay between the body and the spatial environment. Encompassing an array of diverse forms and interpretations, this theme is explored through deafness, supernatural visitations, Cold War histories, images of depression and Thai animation history.

The screening is curated and introduced by visiting curator Mary Pansanga alongside artist Tanatchai Bandasak, who will stage an intervention before the screening begins.

Mary Pansanga is an independent curator working across cinema and contemporary art contexts, institutions and spaces. In 2023 she co-founded STORAGE, a Bangkok project space. Tanatchai Bandasak is an artist whose work explores light, living matter, habitat, and geology.

Space-Body Entanglement is presented by CIRCUIT, Enjoy Contemporary Art Space and Pyramid Club in association with the exhibition Homing Instinct, now showing at Enjoy until 31 August.

The visit of Mary Pansanga and Tanatchai Bandasak is supported by the Asia New Zealand Foundation.

Screening: 75 minutes followed by Q&A with Mary Pansanga and Tanatchai Bandasak.

Programme:

1) Jeanne Penjan Lassus, Eye Your Ear (2021)

A young Deaf woman tells us of her first experience going to the cinema. Ensues a poetic exploration of Thai Sign Language and its imagined affinities with film. Eye Your Ear takes as a starting point how we develop our imagination and the ways we relate through language. The film explores the poetic possibilities of non-vocal languages, focusing on Thai Sign Language. Conjuring the notions of illusion, frames of narration and projected images, Eye Your Ear plays with possible parallels and affinities between film and Sign Language. The film experiments with the blurred territory of gestures that signify and suggest, and underlines the tactile quality of our eyes.

2) Pam Virada, Casting a Spell to Alter Reality (2020)

Using scenes from Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Coming of Age trilogy, the film essay is a lyrical study of physical and psychological interiors shaped by spellbinding magic-realist stories, weaved together with Virada's family's disparate memories of supernatural visitations. Via the mysterious occurrences passed down through generations through myth-like storytelling, the work retraces the history of personal and collective perceptions by treading carefully between fact and fiction, magic and reality. Commissioned by the Asian Film Archive.

3) Saroot Supasuthivech, Security Guard (2017)

Security Guard is divided into two parts. The first part tells the story of a security guard at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (BACC) while she was on duty. The second part depicts the interior architecture of BACC during off hours. The work involved shapes and objects created from ambient and experimental sounds collected within the building. By creating this work, Saroot aims to make the intangible atmosphere in BACC visible through tangible objects.

4) Tulapop Saenjaroen, Squish! (2021)

Inspired by overlooked potentials of early animation and the reductive representation of depression in media, Squish! is a meditation on the self through lurid and liquid forms; filtered through both old and foreseeable technology informed by Thai animation history (both as commercial products and as weaponized propaganda) as well as self-made-self- care contents in contemporary culture to re-question the constant process of constructing and deforming new selves to simulate ‘movements’. By extrapolating and redefining the terms of ‘movement’, be it through psychological, physical or political understandings, the work interweaves the medium of animation with a state of depression to re-comprehending the blurred lines between being inanimate, animating, and being animated. Commissioned by the Asian Film Archive

5) Korakrit Arunanondchai & Alex Gvojic (with Tosh Basco), No history in a room filled with people with funny names 5 (2018)

The narratives in No history in a room filled with people with funny names 5 are based the idea of the 'Ghost Cinema', a phenomenon that started during the settlement of the American Army during the Vietnam war in Northern Thailand, where monks would set up outdoor movie screenings for spirits to come watch movies, and for people to come watch movies with the spirits. The screen became a point of encounter between the human body and the non-physical. Arunanondchai allowed the space for these 'ghosts' to stand in for stories and localised subjectivities that escape the linear narrative of history. The video centers around the rescue of a Thai soccer team that was stuck in a cave in Northern Thailand and how they got instrumentalized as military propaganda. Arunanondchai attempts to trace and map out the construction of the current Thai identity through its relationship to America and the CIA during the cold war.

6) Pathompon Mont Tesprateep, Lullaby #2 (2021-2024)

An excerpt of an endless video loop of a switched-off rotating ceiling fan while a gentle breeze flows through the underside of a biennale exhibition building.

Special thanks to Creative New Zealand for supporting Pyramid Club's programme