Ghost2565

Video and performance art series&nbsp;12.10–13.11 2022&nbsp;Curated by Christina Li

Ghost is a video and performance art series that takes place in Bangkok, Thailand.&nbsp;Following&nbsp;Ghost:2561 (October 11–28, 2018) curated by co-founder&nbsp;Korakrit Arunanondchai, the second edition&nbsp;Ghost 2565: Live Without Dead Time curated by&nbsp;Christina Li takes place from October 12 to November 13, 2022 in venues throughout Bangkok.&nbsp;Ghost 2565 highlights untold stories of figures and places caught in the chasms created by the incohesion and tensions of contemporary life. A response to the specific context of Bangkok,&nbsp;Ghost 2565 assembles multivalent presents, pasts, and futures that attempt to define a phantasmagorial city in resistance to homogenous narratives. The subtitle is translated from the line “vivre sans temps mort”, spray-painted on the wall of the Sorbonne in Paris in May 1968, which pointed to the collective state of comatose compliance in the face of capitalism when society had become a monstrous accumulation of spectacles and commodified experiences. Confronted with the totalizing power of representation, how might we disrupt the forces that lull us into empty existence?&nbsp;This second edition occupies the glitch produced by desynchronized space and time and the conflicting visions of an amorphous city in flux. From within the Bangkok’s fabric,&nbsp;Ghost 2565 forges a space of mutual learning by gathering perspectives from established and emerging artists and practitioners from Thailand, the wider region, and beyond connected through shared urgencies and struggles across temporalities and geographies. The triennial series inspires audiences to establish and inhabit existing frameworks toward other possible knowledge and futures and yield new forms of living. In searching for alternative narratives that reside in the crevices, this multidisciplinary platform catalyzes a collective act to reclaim disinherited time and spaces to explore the subjectivities, untold stories, and shared visions that might emerge.

* All exhibition venues open on Wednesday–Sunday, from 13:00–18:00&nbsp; * Jim Thompson Arts Center is open daily, from 10:00–18:00&nbsp;&nbsp;Entrance to exhibition and events in all venues are free. Programs are in English with Thai assistance unless otherwise noted. Event details and times are subject to change.&nbsp;Events that require advance registration are listed; details to be announced.

* สถานที่จัดแสดงนิทรรศการทั้งหมดเปิดทำการวันพุธ–อาทิตย์ เวลา 13:00–18:00 น. * Jim Thompson Arts Center เปิดทุกวัน เวลา 10:00–18:00 น. ไม่มีค่าใช้จ่ายในการเข้าร่วมกิจกรรม กิจกรรมทั้งหมดดำเนินรายการเป็นภาษาอังกฤษพร้อมแปลสรุปความเป็นภาษาไทย (เว้นแต่จะมีการแจ้งล่วงหน้า) ในบางกิจกรรม ผู้เข้าร่วมต้องลงทะเบียนล่วงหน้า

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Join the artist in an informal conversation around her work, Phantom Banquet (2019–20), a 360-degree VR project located at Baan Trok Tua Ngork.&nbsp;

 Meet the artist: with Lap-See Lam at House

In this talk, Nguyen will speak about her process behind her video installation&nbsp;IF REVOLUTION IS A SICKNESS and her newly released same titled accompanying publication.

Artist talk and Book Launch: IF REVOLUTION IS A SICKNESS” by Diane Severin Nguyen 

The artists speak about their work, process, and new publication&nbsp;Not What I Meant But Anyway&nbsp;that addresses friction, entanglement, porousness, reflection, and self-implication.

Artist talk: Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen

In this conversation, two artists share ideas behind their respective works and how they deconstruct linear narratives within the realm of expanded cinema.&nbsp;

Artist talk: with Tulapop Saenjaroen and Emily Wardill, moderated by curator Christina Li

Ghost 2565: Anthology writers join editors Wirunwan Pitaktong and Pongsakorn Yananissorn. The conversation centers on the collection of ten short stories in Thai and English, with reflections on writing deemed illegible by dominant approaches to reading and the agency of characters under conditions they did not choose.This talk is conducted in Thai. &nbsp;

Book launch and talk: Anthology with Duanwad Pimwana, Uthis Haemamool, and editors at House

&nbsp;&nbsp;Bring your own T-shirts to be silkscreened with the Ghost 2565 logo through using natural indigo dye; beverages provided by Italasia.

Family day: silkscreen workshop with Korakrit Arunanondchai and Philip Huang and sound bath with Note Panayanggool at Bangkok 1899

Please note: This event will be postponed to November 5, 2022.&nbsp;&nbsp;Bring your own T-shirts to be silkscreened with the Ghost 2565 logo through using natural indigo dye; beverages provided by Italasia.

The weekly series is organized by Ghost 2565: Hosts, a docent program in which embodied and situated knowledge of artworks and locations is shared with visitors part of and outside the local community.&nbsp;

Gathering: Hosts and Guests 

Gathering: Hosts and Guests with Nawarat Welployngam at HouseNawarat Welployngam, a community leader and activist of the Nanleong as well as friends of Ghost 2565: Hosts talk on modes of community resistance, and the many ways in which we could retain agency amidst forces that seek to displace our narratives.&nbsp;

Gathering: Hosts and Guests with Nawarat Welployngam

Pailin Chitprasertsuk, an independent researcher and journalist focusing on Charoen Krung and surrounding areas talks to Philip Cornwel-Smith, author of Very Bangkok: In the City of the Senses (2020) about learning a neighborhood and its inhabitants, what defines a community, and the tensions within micro-narratives faced with homogenizing forces.&nbsp;&nbsp;The weekly series is organized by Ghost 2565: Hosts, a docent program in which embodied and situated knowledge of artworks and locations is shared with visitors part of and outside the local community.&nbsp;

Gathering: Hosts and Guests with Pailin Chitprasertsuk and Philip Cornwel-Smith

Join us for Ghost 2565’s last afterparty with Karaoke and Dj sessions from Nuhpeace and Pete TR. &nbsp;

Ghost 2565: Afterparty at Mischa Cheap

The artist proposes an auditory experience as the extended version of her work Garden Amidst the Flame and the archive of research used in its making. The musical interpretation unfolds processes of entanglement between ancestor knowledge, modernity, and femininity embedded in the ritual practice of Minahasa.*Limited capacity, please sign up by sending an email to info@ghost2565.com.

Listening session: Strange Sounds with Natasha Tontey at De Commune

registration required

Opening at Baan Trok Tua Ngork 

Opening at Jim Thompson Art Center

Opening at World Travel Service

Opening: Galleries Night at BANGKOK CITYCITY Gallery

The artists present this one-day-only immersive installation conceived in the context of a planetarium and projected 360 degrees at FAAMAI Digital Dome near Chulalongkorn University.&nbsp;The presentation is accessible between 15:00 and 21:00 on October 21 only.

Opening: One-day Presentation of Heavens by Revital Cohen and Tuur van Balen

Film installation accompanied by Sato, a traditional northeastern Thai rice wine made by the artist’s mother.

Opening: SOO-KWAN2022 by Chantana Tiprachart

For more information, and to attend the press talk, please contact press@ghost2565.com.

Press Talk with the Curator and Artists 

The artist is joined by a DUDE, MOVIE, a collective dedicated to screening and talking about movies in a casual manner, demystifying the artistic process and approaching movies in a friendly way. Deeply engaged in the political discourse both Chantana Tiprachart and DUDE, MOVIE offer films addressing resistance from the peripheries.

Screening and Talk: with Chantana Tiprachart and Dude, Movie

Two artist-writers, Orawan Arunrak and Li Shuang, discuss language, embodiment, and how writing influences their artistic practice in relation to their Ghost 2565: Anthology contributions and their respective works in Ghost 2565.&nbsp;

Talk: with Orawan Arunrak and Li Shuang, moderated by curator Christina Li

Wendy’s Work World is an alter-ego and character-driven culinary project. Wendy’s residency at Baan Trok Tua Ngork during&nbsp;Ghost 2565 sees her incorporating research of the area and the evolution of Chinese cooking in Bangkok’s Chinatown through the lens of the wok.Every week from Thursday to Saturday, audiences can get a glimpse of her world through her rotating program of signature wok dishes and new ones she has researched during her time in residence at Baan Trok Tua Ngork.19:30 session ticketing details announced each Monday.

book ticket

Wendy’s Wok World at House

Wendy’s Work World is an alter-ego and character-driven culinary project. Wendy’s residency at Baan Trok Tua Ngork during&nbsp;Ghost 2565 sees her incorporating research of the area and the evolution of Chinese cooking in Bangkok’s Chinatown through the lens of the wok.Every week from Thursday to Saturday, audiences can get a glimpse of her world through her rotating program of signature wok dishes and new ones she has researched during her time in residence at Baan Trok Tua Ngork. 19:30 session ticketing details announced each Monday.

Wendy’s Work World is an alter-ego and character-driven culinary project. Wendy’s residency at Baan Trok Tua Ngork during&nbsp;Ghost 2565 sees her incorporating research of the area and the evolution of Chinese cooking in Bangkok’s Chinatown through the lens of the wok. Every week from Thursday to Saturday, audiences can get a glimpse of her world through her rotating program of signature wok dishes and new ones she has researched during her time in residence at Baan Trok Tua Ngork. 19:30 session ticketing details announced each Monday.

Book ticket

Wendy’s Work World is an alter-ego and character-driven culinary project. Wendy’s residency at Baan Trok Tua Ngork during&nbsp;Ghost 2565 sees her incorporating research of the area and the evolution of Chinese cooking in Bangkok’s Chinatown through the lens of the wok.Every week from Thursday to Saturday, audiences can get a glimpse of her world through her rotating program of signature wok dishes and new ones she has researched during her time in residence at Baan Trok Tua Ngork.&nbsp;19:30 session ticketing details announced each Monday.

Wendy’s Work World is an alter-ego and character-driven culinary project. Wendy’s residency at Baan Trok Tua Ngork during&nbsp;Ghost 2565 sees her incorporating research of the area and the evolution of Chinese cooking in Bangkok’s Chinatown through the lens of the wok.Every week from Thursday to Saturday, audiences can get a glimpse of her world through her rotating program of signature wok dishes and new ones she has researched during her time in residence at Baan Trok Tua Ngork. 19:30 session ticketing details announced each Monday.

Ghost 2565 is a video and performance art series in Bangkok, which takes place from October 12 – November 13, 2022, curated by Christina Li.

ซีรีส์วิดิโอและศิลปะการแสดง&nbsp;12.10–13.11 2022&nbsp;คิวเรตโดยคริสติน่า ลี

ÆTHER reflects on the mediated world through a ring light, untethering the body from being so that it can drift into making connections beneath a pixelated sky. The kaleidoscopic video collage references the ancient Chinese myth “Nv Wa Patches Up the Sky” about a goddess who created the universe and humans out of mud and clay. Catastrophe struck when the fire and water deities’ conflict caused the heavens to crumble, and the goddess patched up the holes that were left with herself. Bodily sublimation characterizes the conditions of contemporary life, where identities leak and blend with one another. Enmeshed in manufactured realities, the screen has come to define and dissolve not only our notion of labor and leisure but how we manifest these as activities. A webcam model mixes and restructures the concept of pleasure, while a mukbang vlogger escalates the simple act of eating into a spectacle of endless consumption. Subject and object mirror each other in the attempt to reflect on each other forever, which can never really be realized. Being everywhere and nowhere, memories and lineages detach and reattach endlessly through networks of online hyper-connectivity, caught in the era of seismic shifts where the mediated world no longer holds up the heavens.&nbsp; Li Shuang’s expansion on her investigation with the mediated world is shaped by her experiences of absence and fleeting sense of belonging, where one settles not in one place, but in shifting constellations.&nbsp;ÆTHER is an ode to reclaiming unmediated experience, asking amidst the sea of avatars and representations, where our body resides. &nbsp;Commissioned by Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai.

ÆTHER (Poor Objects)

How do we decipher and infer meaning when translating across malleable forms and languages in a complex world? Here, as a dual-screen presentation,&nbsp;Brine Lake (A New Body) meditates on the degree slippery narratives, errant individual and collective subjectivities destabilize definitions of statelessness, belonging, and identity across national borders. Filmed on a blank set, the work is staged in a fictional iodine recycling plant, while the camera tracks a series of business conversations between human protagonists and phantom factory representatives in Japanese, Korean, and Russian. Gradually, the disquieting exchanges deviate from its original course and converges into multilingual cacophony of imaginary and historical narratives, to address resource extraction, ecology, cultural assimilation, and alienation connected to experiences of colonialism and war in East Asia.&nbsp; These fragmentary utterances expose the traumatic memories of Koreans forcefully displaced, up to this day, from their homeland to Japan and Russia. Iodine, and its extraction and processing, are metaphors for statelessness, technology, and control mechanisms. Within the video installation, the restlessness and nonappearance of both chemical element and ghostly subjects are devices Shen uses to activate spaces of unsettled relations where not only the protagonists but also the audiences become entangled. This vulnerability is embodied within one of the remarks of the protagonists, “…&nbsp;something like iodine, uprooted from its assumed belonging, even in the form of a finished product, even after having been consumed, it never stops becoming.”&nbsp; Supported by Rijksakademie Amsterdam, DeAppel Amsterdam, M+ Museum Hong Kong and Gwangju Biennale, South Korea&nbsp;&nbsp;

Brine Lake (A New Body)

“Isn’t it all a matter of life and death? But maybe it is a matter of how far death is allowed into your life,” says an allegorical figure of Death—a skeleton reclined and trapped within the TV screen. The figure is reminiscent of a medieval character, musing, and speaking of repetitive days from the plague-ridden streets of old to those of Covid-19 where death appears as an endless barrage of images online, eternal and contemporary. The app TikTok becomes a countdown to the inevitable. It is the disturbing voice we all have inside our head, a constant chattering that silences us in view of the end of everything. A naked young man with a clarinet responds to and plays off Death, who delivers a monologue. Trapped and isolated on their separate screens in adjoining spaces, they attempt to connect. Both are monoliths without color, the figures not moving images on screen, but characters caged within the TVs that are part of their bodies and which share our dimension, inhabiting our reality.&nbsp; We are confronted with a finality we had grown accustomed to distracting ourselves from. What does our conception of death so divorced from the reality of the body do to our perception of time, when death tolls are nothing but statistics that pop in and out?&nbsp;DEATH and&nbsp;SNAKE CHARMER are part of Özgür Kar’s&nbsp;MACABRE series: an invitation to look at our own image in a mirror held up by death, a remedy to a world in which we have tried to deny death yet are constantly reminded of it.&nbsp;

DEATH

Heavens is an immersive installation that draws inspiration from a hypothesis that regards the octopus as a radical other being evolved from a virus from outer space. The work proposes an alternative understanding of ecology, and transforming one’s relationship to the world on a cosmic scale. The multi-brained&nbsp;cephalopod is evoked in absentia; its body rendered into being by historical and cultural projections attached to this alien species. Probing manifold forms of knowledge, such as astrophysics, forensic psychotherapy, and escapology, the artists interviewed experts about and around the behavior and character of octopi; the words form the lyrics to the libretto accompanying the hypnotic imagery.&nbsp; In 1926, Walter Benjamin wrote “To the Planetarium” after the opening of the Berlin Zeiss-Planetarium, a melancholic lament on a sense of loss, and the effacement of wonder at the universe ushered in by advances in optical technology. The expansionist quest for science transport modern humans further away from questions of our existence in relationship to planetary history and deep time. Conceived with the context of a planetarium in mind, the geodesic presentation comes full circle in Bangkok. At odds with a world of deprived of visceral experience, when gathered in communion,&nbsp;Heavens recalls moments of being alive, amid reinstating our relationship with other bodies that transcends our planet into deep space. <a href="https://admin.ghost2565.com/uploads/Heavens_subtitles_EN_TH_befdc8187d.pdf?updated_at=2022-10-21T02:20:56.937Z">Download Libretto</a> Commissioned by The Serpentine Galleries London, with support by Malevich.io. Composition by Pan Daijing features vocals of Anna Davidson and Marie Gailey.&nbsp;&nbsp;

Heavens

Diane Severin Nguyen expands on her nuanced investigation of contemporary politics and their complicated expressions and embodiment in&nbsp;IF REVOLUTION IS A SICKNESS.&nbsp;Beginning with the dreary landscapes of Warsaw, the video follows an orphaned Vietnamese child as she associates and attempts to discover her own identity within a nation as well as ideological belonging through K-pop. The protagonist, Weronika, is played by a Polish-Vietnamese teenager Nguyen discovered on social media. Embodying the stereotypical position of outsider, she navigates complex transnational political alliances formed during the Cold War and the struggles of the Vietnamese diasporic population currently living in Poland. “If I don’t become an artist then I will just remain a victim”—the lyrics suggest a call for emancipation, to configure possibilities and live in a new image. A narrated rumination sourced from various texts about revolution on collective action and the paradox of liberation and alienation moves into a performance of a pop music video that gives the work its title. The insistence to find an identity comes to the fore as protagonist Weronika and members of her adopted dance troupe members “lose themselves to the new image” as sung in the song’s lyrics. It becomes imperative to ask on whose terms an identity is formed, and how then one finds their name within a nation, a regime, in a force ever so encompassing. Caught between nostalgia for revolutionary fervor for pasts yet realized and present-day pop culture co-optation of every ideology, the self is fraught and must transition, attach and reattach themselves through the whirlwind of media. IF REVOLUTION IS A SICKNESS’s presence in Bangkok is ever relevant, where histories are rewritten with each passing day and the substance of political trauma steadily rises yet is surpassed by a regime of image production that dominates the political and popular imagination. &nbsp;Co-produced by SculptureCenter, New York and Renaissance Society, Chicago. Additional support for the video was provided by the Polish Cultural Institute New York and U jazdowski Residencies, Warsaw.

IF REVOLUTION IS A SICKNESS

The final instalment of the titular sci-fi trilogy (2017–22) by Meriem Bennani follows the lives of inhabitants detained on CAPS, a swamp-rimmed island, where the mythological reptile “Croco” serves as idol and mascot. Short for capsule, the island-turned-refugee camp is home to illegal immigrants intercepted by “troopers” mid-teleportation from Africa across the Atlantic to the United States. The artist constructs a peculiar world fusing CGI and remixing visual tropes of digital content, advertising, and reality TV to humorously explore themes of bio and surveillance technologies, data, state control, and forced displacement—a stark reflection of our present-day realities.&nbsp; In this episode, Bennani zooms in on a burgeoning liberation movement on CAPS that bridges across three generations, in a future where ages, bodies, and places are interchangeable and can be upgraded, at a price. Amid the many personalities within the struggle are a DJ called Amyn and his 65-year-old father Kamal who acquires a new body to join the underground CAPsi resistance to defend their homeland. United in their pursuit of freedom, we witness the individuals and the collective, young and old, train their bodies and develop provisional weapons, in the form of call-and-response songs, techno tunes, counter-telecommunication systems, and makeshift cloaking technologies. Deliberately open-ended, we are left to speculate on the outcome of the face-off between CAPsi and the state troopers, and the realities and necessary sacrifices, be it the prime of youth, or in the father’s case, one’s lifetime, for a larger political cause.&nbsp; Co-commissioned by Renaissance Society, Chicago and Nottingham Contemporary, UK. &nbsp;

Life on the CAPS

Earth returns to his hometown in Rayong, Thailand, where his sister, Ink runs their family-owned mangosteen-processing factory. In this province on the east coast of the gulf, mangosteen plantations are plentiful and oil spills occasional. Shot in dated Digital8 format, the film portrays the mundanity of labor among employees in an industrial fruit processing plant against the doubt-filled fancies of its owners. Caught in their conflicting visions of the future of the factory, and by extension their individual prospective lives, Earth, the protagonist, descends into a frenzied state that results in his eventual disappearance. An unreliable narrator wonders about the story he is telling, fictionalizing characters in the way they might have fictionalized themselves. All agency slowly dissipates as characters embrace their potential to become unhinged, not in a negative sense of destruction, but as a liberation from preconceived narratives.&nbsp; The grotesque pulp of mangosteens cut against shots of neuroscientific images of nerves bring mixed feelings of beauty, violence, and indifference. The culling of natural resources, brutal mismanagement, corruption of government bodies, and metaphorical beheading schemes exist in the same universe. Different sets of logic from human and non-human actors collide ready to implode at any moment, sparking either transformation or annihilation.&nbsp;Mangosteen reflects on the potential of fiction, the substance that frees subjects real or imagined from themselves. This is a tale for a chronically anxious and futureless time, where rationality merely sets the stage for its own undoing, creating alternative stories for desubjectivization. Saenjaroen's practice embodies the power of narratives freed from the shackles of reality to reform the subject. Commissioned by Ghost Foundation.&nbsp;

Mangosteen

Emily Wardill has long been invested in deconstructing cinema to explore the disconnect between movement of time and bodies, images, histories, and narrative structures.&nbsp;Night for Day imagines a fictive kinship in Portugal, composed from a series of interviews with Isabel do Carmo, founding member of an armed resistance in the 70s, and two young astrophysicists, Alexander Bridi and Djelal Osman, who run a Lisbon-based start-up that develops software for computer image recognition. Set against instabilities of the two different historical junctures, the film stitches together fragments to unpack the variances of past political ideals and a present-day techno utopia, a binary epitomized by this phantasmal mother-son relationship.&nbsp; The make-believe family takes up residence in the home of architect Antônio Teixeira Guerra—completed in the same year the fascist government fell in 1974. Shot in the magic hour, the time Guerra chose to invite guests, Wardill probes the illusory moment when perception breaks down, where objects are caught in the interplay of clarity and semi-darkness. The film collages found glitchy footage of actresses cast as automations, on the verge of disintegrating, as a counterpoint to resist the latest computer-image processing technology. In the film, Do Camo says, “we’ve been experiencing continuous defeat. We must think in terms of an obvious utopian future.” Employing punctures and nonlinearity, Wardill’s work sheds light on female subjectivity, political labor, and performativity while questioning how new utopias can be formulated, haunted by historical visions and a techno-teleology reality to come.&nbsp;Courtesy the artist and Carlier Gebauer, Berlin.&nbsp; Produced by Stenar Projects, Lisbon.

Night for Day

Phantom Banquet is a complex apparition of cultural belonging, a manifestation of memories as places that draw their identity from the Cantonese diaspora in Sweden. From Lap-See Lam’s grandmother’s restaurant that opened in the 60s in Stockholm to other Chinese restaurants, an archeological excavation becomes data from 3D scans that articulate a language of aesthetics and interior architecture, from the past to the future layered in shipwrecks navigated across generations. A visage of real and remembered space constructs a place out of time and space, a locating of somewhere always slipping in and out of neatly defined definitions. Familiarity hangs in the air, yet this place is not situated anywhere in particular, a shared cultural afterimage that resonates across geographies from Asia to Europe and back formed through collective memories. A specter crafted of the very same material of history narrates the scene, at once revealing the limits of empirical data and expanding the gaps in the fluidity of cultural histories.&nbsp; Presented in Bangkok’s Chinatown at an ancestral home,&nbsp;Phantom Banquet stirs and conjures suppressed stories, disturbing notions of a cohesive cultural landscape. When neighboring homes and buildings are vanishing every day in the face of development in the name of progress, the work is a haunting reminder of a place soon to only exist in the void, data, and memories. Seated around a common Chinese dining table as if in a seance, visitors are invited to dine on their own entangled identities.&nbsp; &nbsp;VR equipment support by PICO.&nbsp; Commissioned by and first presented at Performa 19 Biennial, New York. Original music and Sound Design: Marlena Salonen Sound Mixing and Mastering: Linus Hillborg Voice actor: Ping-Kwan Lam Translation and editing: Ping-Kwan, Yuk-Lin Lam, Lap-Yan Lam Real Time Engine Consultants: Martin Christensen, Dennis Härmä Motion Capture Studio: DevinSense VR Producer: Sofia Curman The artist would like to thank the restaurant staff and their families at New Peking City, Hang Chow, Mandarin City, Ming Garden, Ming Palace, Bamboo Garden, Ho Wah, Hong Kong, Wing Shing, and Winner House. &nbsp;

Phantom Banquet

James Richards’s expanded practice examines themes of obsession, desire, and technology through archival research, found footage, and extensive collaboration. His latest film is a culmination of a series of his recent experiments and collaborative projects centered around liminality as well as the aesthetics and politics of the invisible. The work emerged from Richards’s re-digestion of his recent video work collaged with film footage by his frequent collaborator Leslie Thornton and daily photographs by late artist Horst Ademeit (1937—2010) that were intended to systematically capture “cold rays”, which he believed affected his body and his surroundings.&nbsp; Whizzing in and out of various ranges, digital and analogue technologies, the images in&nbsp;Qualities of Life tremble, morph, and leak into one another, intimating the unsettled edges between body, camera, and the image. The camera’s endoscopic gaze maps and penetrates the skin of still lifes, bodies, and domestic interiors with the help of x-rays, and flatbed and MRI scans, to access negative spaces imperceptible to the human eye. In a world comprised of an unending stream of information and images, Richards’s discombobulating sequence of images moves across various affective registers to break down abject notions of waste, disease, and decay. The haunting undercurrents of paranoia vibrate through Richards’s soundtrack and forensic approach to medical paraphernalia, life’s detritus, and sewage systems. The work lays bare the fear and desire to render visible or make present information that while unseen is the evidence of a corporeal existence.&nbsp;Courtesy the artist; Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin; Estate of Horst Ademeit; and Fondazione In Between Art Film, Venice. &nbsp;

Qualities Of Life: Living in the Radiant Cold

SOO-KWAN2022&nbsp;is a look at what is overexposed and underexposed and what remains in between in the Isaan region of Thailand.&nbsp;The title takes its name from Soo-Kwan, a ceremony in the region meant to summon a Kwan, a spiritual and metaphorical force (a kind of muse) of courage and livelihood to return to the body—a Kwan is a spirit that leaves the body when a person is frightened or traumatized, alive but only physically. In the work an image of a barren dark road sparsely lit is a common sight in rural Northeastern regions, but this darkness is constructed, deliberately from and to obscure the exploitation of labor and resources used to construct the shining center. Contradicting the dim streetlights are highly decorated royal facades, gateways, and ceremonial structures. The brightness of modernization has cast a large shadow, one that hides the conditions for building a nation-state. The glow of religion snuffs out other beliefs, relinquishing them to darkness. The trail of shadows behind us appear as spirits and ghosts, poverty in the fields. How then does one navigate these gaps of opacities and illuminate the self once again? A Mor lam song sung throughout the work traces Issan’s history, telling tales from forced assimilation to the purging of communists with messages of disobedience passed down through rhyme and rhythm to reinvigorate the spirit.&nbsp;SOO-KWAN2022&nbsp;at once laments past and present injustices and is a ritual to summon the Kwan that has been forced out and construct again our own image, to make visible in a light returned. Assessing the ever-changing dynamics of Thai culture from high to low, as well as the forces that dictate and frame these narratives, telling stories from the margins of Isaan has always been a part of Chantana Tiprachart’s practice. Operating on commercial and non-commercial fronts, her stories string together myths and the present, dissolving barriers of culture and offering alternatives to being Thai. Commissioned by Ghost Foundation, Bangkok.Produced by the Han Nefkens Foundation, Barcelona with additional support from Mae-Ruay Snack Food Factory Co., Ltd.

SOO-KWAN2022

Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen’s research-driven projects interrogate the sites, raw materials, labor, and commodities that form global production chains through the lens of economics, geopolitics, and neoliberalism. Part of their multifaceted project on the gaming industry,&nbsp;The Odds (Part 1) considers gambling as a contemporary condition, whereby they trace the political and cultural implications enmeshed within a physical and virtual matrix of places and bodies, drawing attention to irrational and self-exploitive practices at play. By juxtaposing three scenes—racehorses getting anesthetized with ketamine ahead of being operated on, show girls dancing their routines for a Macau casino, and the anarcho-punk band Crass front man Steve Ignorant becoming a bingo-caller in a former church—the artists zero in on the vulnerable bodies that sustain and submit to the ruthless forces of speculation and capital.&nbsp;&nbsp; Central to the gaming industry is the production of spectacles that suspend disbelief: case in point are the Macau resorts Venetian and forthcoming Londoner, designed as simulacra for the cities from which they take their names. The backer of both is a huge political supporter of Donald Trump and finances West Bank settlements. The work thereby binds together the devastation of actual and fictional geopolitical issues, overlaid with random computer-generated glitches and visual glitter that disrupts the image such that the LED wall is part screen and light display. The seductive visual sensations and amalgamation of fantasy, entertainment, and precarity synthesized in these artificial worlds underscore the neoliberal trance that not only we, but the artists as cultural producers, are captured within, endure. Supported by Flanders State of the Art. Co-commissioned by Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston, UK;, Philadelphia Museum of Art; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Art Institute of Chicago. With thanks to Naomi Esser, David Falkner, Hannah Fasching, Yasmin Hepburn, Lily Mccraith, Alexander Paveley, Lucia Pietroiusti, Elizabeth Price, Georgina Rae, Jan Wade, and Steve Williams.

The Odds (Part 1)

Wu Tsang is a filmmaker and performer whose multi-disciplinary practice highlights hidden struggles and marginalized narratives, while consistently exploring strategies of collaboration, performance, and improvisation. Her deeply collaborative approach engendered the foundation of the performance group she co-founded with Tosh Basco called “Moved by the Motion” in 2016. Some of the ensemble members joined Tsang as she took up the role of director in residence at the Schauspielhaus theater in Zurich. Shot at the theater with the ensemble just before the pandemic-led lockdown, the furore around George Floyd’s murder, and the Black Lives Matter protests, the script is comprised of parts of Tsang’s long-time collaborator Fred Moten’s evolving poem&nbsp;come on, get it that contemplates indivisibility, visibility, fluidity, earth, and mud in their constitutive relationship to blackness. In fusing documentary and narrative filmmaking approaches,&nbsp;The show is over, in Tsang’s words, “addresses themes around policing, and violence, and embodies our resistance as black, queer, POC under perpetual siege of the State.”&nbsp;&nbsp; As Basco puts it, the film is “a composition of compositions”, and a “pursuit of study and play”. The work combines staging, lighting, scenography, camography (camera-choreography), and improvised movement of individuals, shadows, and voices to complicate the ordering of relations that destabilizes typical power dynamics between performer and camera, as well as the possibility of any centered subject in relation to others in the frame. A line from the poem, “the world is dry land, earth is water” sets the scene and is a metaphor for the dichotomy of a bare constructed society of control versus the wet muckiness of earth. In a different scene, a choreography of ascensions and descensions onto an illusory Penrose triangle, an infinite staircase to nowhere, both connects and separates the performers, depending on one’s viewpoint. A raw account of bodies touching, congregating and disapearing between death and resurrection, the non-linear work is a powerful negotiation of ways of living and surviving that refuses singularity and embraces a perpetually unfixed politics of representation.&nbsp; A film by Wu Tsang with Tosh Basco and Moved by the Motion.Original score by Asma Maroof, with Patrick Belaga, Kelsey Lu, Ahya Simone, Klein, and Austin Williamson.Production of Schauspielhaus Zürich, and co-produced by Lafayette Foundation with additional support by UBS Kulturstiftung.

The show is over

Wa’anak Witu Watu is an investigation into the Minahasan cosmology in North Sulawesi, Indonesia through a lens of humans in relation to geological forces, rocks, lava, stones, and sediments that have their own ontologies. The video originates from a myth that the first person, a woman, gave birth to a stone, normalizing human-stone communications, and the understanding that we are made of the same material. Covering 75 percent of the Earth’s outer layer, stone is considered not as an exploitable resource necessary to the foundation of civilization, but as a sentient companion. The artist’s works contain glitches and embrace a digital aesthetics with internet and video game references. 3D mythological figures characterize a portion of the work and hint at a past manifest in the present, actualizing these fictions asking how we think of a time beyond humanity, to a geological time, or to the futurity of geological kinship. The Epoch of Mapalucene accompanies&nbsp;Wa’anak Witu Watu and expands on this cosmology, looking at the collective economies of the Mapalus. Approaching stone’s versatility and immortality, not as that to be commoditized and traded but a source of life. With influences from Western colonialism, the gift economy shifted through capitalist beliefs into a stone-based exchange system. Indigenous peoples of Minahasa have rallied to pass the indigenous rights bill and scenes in this work show people practicing their trade as a collective call for a reimagining of society based on reciprocity across species.&nbsp; In&nbsp;Garden Amidst the Flame, a fantasy coming-of-age story is written after Tontey’s participation in a Karai Ritual with Minahasan warriors in armor that grants invulnerability. Recontextualizing the traditionally hyper-masculine ritual,&nbsp;Garden Amidst the Flame presents a different understanding of the possibilities of the practice as a mode of caring and empowering women. A young girl named Visray goes on a journey from present to past and back again meeting a gang of female youth warriors, Wulan Lengkoan. Entering the realities informed by Minahasan mythologies leads to the beheading of a Rooster beast, ayam jago, a rite of passage that transforms her into a warrior in kabsaran attire. Ancestral knowledge clashes and fuses with modern pop culture in this nonlinear story, where a living Coelacanth (one of the oldest fish that was thought to be extinct), raja laut, arriving on a bike is as much a part of the world as posters of Western celebrities.&nbsp; Wa’anak Witu Watu, and The Epoch of Mapalucene, 2021 are commissioned by Other Futures and transmediale in 2021. Garden Amidst the Flame, 2022 is commissioned and produced by Auto Italia, London in partnership with La Becque, Tour-de-Peilz; Stroom Den Haag, The Hague; and Shedhalle, Zurich. With additional support from the Governance of North Sulawesi, Bank SulutGo, and the Department of Tourism and Culture of North Sulawesi. Natasha Tontey’s participation at Ghost 2565 is made possible with support by SAM Fund for Arts and Ecology.

Wa’anak Witu Watu

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&nbsp;* All exhibition venues open on Wednesday–Sunday, from 13:00–18:00&nbsp; *Jim Thompson Arts Center is open daily, from 10:00–18:00&nbsp;

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In this platform for mutual exchange twelve artists are given the opportunity to discuss their work with leading figure in film and contemporary art Emily Wardill, a Ghost 2565 participant artist.&nbsp;During this day-long event, Wardill delivers a comprehensive reading of filmmaking in a masterclass lodged in today’s most pertinent questions and in her recent work on cinema’s potential to access imaginary forces—and the implications of that in our relationship to images.&nbsp;The “imagined image” connotes experiences overshadowed by myths, their ghosts, as well as utopias, concepts of the nation-state, dreams of all sorts where materiality that is never concrete nevertheless insinuates objects and forms. These ideas form the basis of the day’s discussions. Additionally, Wardill provides professional insight into the development of emerging artistic practices that challenge the boundaries and established categories of art production. Masterclass participants are asked to present their work, or work in progress, and together with Wardill explore concepts such as the outward ability of asking questions and how to preserve dialogue within works. The intimate encounter with this established artist is preceded by a public conversation (October 15, 16:00 at House) that reflects the class’s dynamic function as informal interchange with Wardill.&nbsp;Open call deadline: October 10, 2022&nbsp;Interested participants should send a short motivation on how they relate to the themes of the masterclass, resume, and/or portfolio to <a href="mailto:press@ghost2565.com">press@ghost2565.com</a>.&nbsp;&nbsp;Participation is free and includes refreshments. The masterclass is conducted in English.&nbsp; Organized by Ghost 2565 in partnership with Chanel.&nbsp;&nbsp;

กิจกรรมนี้สร้างพื้นที่สำหรับการแลกเปลื่ยนซึ่งกันและกันระหว่างศิลปินทั้ง 12 คนที่จะได้รับโอกาสในการได้เข้ามาร่วมพูดคุยเกี่ยวกับงานของแต่ละคน กับ Emily Wardill ศิลปินผู้เข้าร่วมในงาน Ghost 2565 อีกทั้งยังเป็นบุคคลสำคัญในแวดวงภาพยนตร์และศิลปะร่วมสมัย&nbsp;&nbsp;ภายในกิจกรรม ศิลปินจะนำเสนอวิธีการอ่านและเข้าใจกระบวนการสร้างภาพยนตร์ ในมาสเตอร์คลาสซึ่งวางตัวอยู่บนคำถามที่สำคัญในการใช้ชิวิตปัจจุบัน รวมถึงในการทำงานช่วงที่ผ่านมาของตัวศิลปินเอง อันมุ่งไปที่การใช้ศักยภาพของภาพยนตร์ในการพาให้เข้าถึงพลังแห่งจินตนาการ และความหมายโดยนัยของสิ่งนั้นในเชิงความสัมพันธ์ระหว่างตัวเราและภาพ&nbsp;“ภาพขอโมนภาพ” สื่อถึงประสบการณ์ที่ถูกปดปังภายใต้ตำนาน เหล่าภูติผี เฉกเช่นเดียวกับยูโทเปีย มโนคติของรัฐชาติ ความฝันที่ซึ่งไม่เคยถูกจับต้องได้และเป็นรูปธรรม แนวคิดเหล่านี้จะประกอบสร้างเป็นพื้นฐานสำคัญในการอภิปรายครั้งนี้ นอกจากนี้ Wardill ยังให้ข้อมูลเชิงลึกเกี่ยวกับการพัฒนาแนวทางการสร้างงานศิลปะที่จะมาท้าทายขอบเขตและประเภทของการสร้างงานศิลปะที่ถูกตีกรอบไว้ ผู้เข้าร่วมกิจกรรมมาสเตอร์คลาสจะนำเสนอผลงาน หรือผลงานที่ยังอยู่ในระหว่างการสร้าง ให้ได้มาสำรวจแนวความคิดไปพร้อมๆกัน เช่น ความสามารถนอกเหนือการตั้งคำถามและการทำอย่างไรให้คงไว้ซึ่งบทสนทนาภายในตัวงาน การพบปะอย่างใกล้ชิดกับศิลปินและเข้าร่วมในบทสนทนาสาธารณะอย่างไม่เป็นทางการ (ในวันที่15 ตุลาคม, 16:00 ที่เฮ้าส์) จะมาสะท้อนการทำงานอย่างเป็นพลวัตของกิจกรรมชั้นเรียนแลกเปลี่ยนนี้&nbsp;เปิดรับสมัครถึงวันที่ 10 ตุลาคม, 2022&nbsp;ให้ผู้ที่สนใจเข้าร่วมกิจกรรมบอกเล่าถึงแรงบันดาลใจความรู้สึกเชื่อมโยงที่มีต่อหัวข้อการอภิปรายในมาสเตอร์คลาสนี้แบบสั้นๆ ประวัติย่อ และ/หรือแฟ้มผลงาน ส่งมาที่ <a href="mailto:press@ghost2565.com">press@ghost2565.com</a>&nbsp;การสมัครเข้าร่วมไม่มีค่าใช้จ่ายและมีเครื่องดื่มบริการให้ กิจกรรมมาสเตอร์คลาสจะดำเนินการเป็นภาษาอังกฤษ&nbsp; กิจกรรมนี้จัดโดย Ghost 2565 ร่วมกับ Chanel&nbsp;&nbsp;

MASTERCLASS: THE IMAGINED IMAGE ไทย

MASTERCLASS: THE IMAGINED IMAGE

Participants guided around Hua Lamphong train station where she recollect her childhood through stories that have encountered present-day realities. The audio walk has limited capacity.&nbsp;

Audio walk: Rituals on Walking by Orawan Arunrak

Participants guided around Hua Lamphong train station where she recollect her childhood through stories that have encountered present-day realities. The audio walk has limited capacity. Session is at capacity.&nbsp;

Participants guided around Hua Lamphong train station where she recollect her childhood through stories that have encountered present-day realities.&nbsp;The audio walk has limited capacity. Session is at capacity.&nbsp;

Participants guided around Hua Lamphong train station where she recollect her childhood through stories that have encountered present-day realities.The audio walk has limited capacity. Session is at capacity.&nbsp;

The new commission builds on Koki Tanaka’s practice in what he termed “collective acts”— creating situations in which people come together to experience moments or actions in which the focus is placed on the relationality that arises between human beings in sharing uncertainties. Responding to tragedies such as the 2011 earthquake in Japan, the artist’s open-ended projects highlight humanity through modest acts that transgress ideological boundaries and languages. This live dusk til dawn event follows Tanaka’s itinerary that takes audiences by bus and on foot through acts of eating, dreaming, and recollecting, which, collectively performed, are further deconstructed with the help of experts in each field.&nbsp; When we eat together, our bodies, in a state of digestion, can be seen as a dismantling of our subjectivities as we reconsider what is whole, stable and in our control. Lucid dreaming can allow for a form of collective awakening; for instance, from fantasies of the past, where the unconscious body recalls and repeats resistance. In returning to contested&nbsp;sites that have been paved over repeatedly throughout history, Tanaka urges us to both physically and mentally enter these tug-o-war spaces where monuments and bodies become sites of living political struggle. How might this cyclical impasse of struggles for power be overcome through collective acts of destabilization and realization, or, eating, talking, and dreaming together in public? What can we learn through art history, revisiting ourselves, and visiting sites that we do not perceive through nostalgia but by learning and relearning our agency within them? Over the course of the night, through exchanging experiences, the temporary company of roving participants attempt to arrive at mutual visions of the future with the help of archives as active repositories of possibilities we might hand over to later generations.&nbsp;Register here&nbsp; <a href="https://forms.gle/ooHwZ7HVoA6C34jY8"><span style="background-color:rgb(245,245,245);color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:-apple-system, system-ui, &quot;Apple Color Emoji&quot;, &quot;Segoe UI&quot;, &quot;Helvetica Neue&quot;, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;">https://forms.gle/ooHwZ7HVoA6C34jY8</a>Commissioned by Ghost Foundation, Bangkok with support from Japan Foundation, Bangkok.

Eating an Apple While Lucid Dreaming

This lecture performance is about an event that is absolutely not possible. It starts with a simple question about “probability” that quickly turned into uneasy matters that put Steyerl and Mroué in confrontation with the space of zero probability where everything is possible but can’t be accounted for.&nbsp;Lecture performance requires advance booking <a href="https://forms.gle/yESHox4ZkQcKSvtE7"><span style="background-color:rgb(245,245,245);color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:-apple-system, system-ui, &quot;Apple Color Emoji&quot;, &quot;Segoe UI&quot;, &quot;Helvetica Neue&quot;, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;">https://forms.gle/yESHox4ZkQcKSvtE7</a>

Lecture performance: Probable Title: Zero Probability

This is new commission builds on the artist’s practice “collective acts“ in which people come together to focus relationality that arises between in sharing uncertainties within Bangkok.&nbsp;This nighttime gathering has limited capacity, please register below. <a href="https://forms.gle/ooHwZ7HVoA6C34jY8"><span style="background-color:rgb(245,245,245);color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:-apple-system, system-ui, &quot;Apple Color Emoji&quot;, &quot;Segoe UI&quot;, &quot;Helvetica Neue&quot;, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;">https://forms.gle/ooHwZ7HVoA6C34jY8</a>

Nighttime Gathering:  Eating an Apple while Lucid Dreaming

This is new commission builds on the artist’s practice “collective acts“ in which people come together to focus relationality that arises between in sharing uncertainties within Bangkok. This nighttime gathering has limited capacity, please register below. <a href="https://forms.gle/ooHwZ7HVoA6C34jY8"><span style="background-color:rgb(245,245,245);color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:-apple-system, system-ui, &quot;Apple Color Emoji&quot;, &quot;Segoe UI&quot;, &quot;Helvetica Neue&quot;, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;">https://forms.gle/ooHwZ7HVoA6C34jY8</a>

Inspired by the emotional and historical intensity reverberating beneath the city. The artist combines sound and movement among other elements to evoke a haunting sonic, affective, and visual landscape that interacts with Bangkok as a site of contested forces.&nbsp;*sign up recommended <a href=" https://bit.ly/uncut2022">https://bit.ly/uncut2022</a>

Performance: Uncut by Pan Daijing

The complex relationship between reality and fiction lies at the core of Rabih Mroué and Hito Steyerl’s artistic practice.&nbsp;In the words of the artists,&nbsp;Probable Title: Zero Probability is a lecture-performance about an event that is absolutely not possible. It starts with a simple question about “probability” that quickly turns into uneasy matters that put Steyerl and Mroué in confrontation with the space of zero probability where everything is possible but can’t be accounted&nbsp;for. Trying to enter into this space, Steyerl and Mroué develop a narrative about probability in art, mathematics, physics, and death. They try to calculate such a space where it is possible to be 100 percent alive and 100 percent dead. But can one explain how 200 percent probability fits into&nbsp;100 percent?&nbsp;Steyerl finds herself entangled within quantum superposition, while Mroué goes to his father asking him for private lessons in mathematics. They both get lost within a cut in a cinematic&nbsp;edit. In looking at the gap, a vanishing point, against the backdrop of violence and traumatic histories both Mroué and Steyerl refer to, the work calls into question the mechanisms behind systems in which individuals can disappear. Just as a real disintegration of the grip on reality ensues, bodies become entangled in the void that is created in between frames, prompting us to ask whether there is the possibility of an outside after all.&nbsp;&nbsp;Register here <a href="https://forms.gle/yESHox4ZkQcKSvtE7"><span style="background-color:rgb(245,245,245);color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:-apple-system, system-ui, &quot;Apple Color Emoji&quot;, &quot;Segoe UI&quot;, &quot;Helvetica Neue&quot;, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;">https://forms.gle/yESHox4ZkQcKSvtE7</a>Produced by HKW/Berlin. &nbsp;

Probable Title: Zero Probability

Growing up around Hua Lamphong, the terminal station of Bangkok’s first railway line, Arunrak has seen not only the migration of people, among them her parents and other family, but also of time. The station is one where lives intersect through the interest of survival, of moving into the center of Bangkok looking for a job or how modernity is prescribed onto neighboring provinces and other regions, an interchange of leaving and returning. Repetitive days and routines of those around the station seem stable, contained in the cycle of survival. The station itself is now on its last leg, ceasing operations and turning into either a museum or a mall.&nbsp; The commissioned piece,&nbsp;Rituals on Walking invites registered participants on a guided audio walk around Hua Lamphong station. A recollection of sights, sounds, and scents that took hold in the artist’s memory finds form in a walk that invites us to follow intersecting lives, their scents and tastes and alphabets. The choreographed journey through the artist’s archive of her formative neighborhood is an antidote to the increasing divorce of the body from the city and the urban compression of time and space. The gap between what you see and what you hear becomes a trigger to reclaim our senses. As her practice urges a reconsideration of the body as extended outward, grafted onto our surroundings and redefined, this walk becomes a mode of forming relationships amidst isolation, to your senses, history, and memories.&nbsp;Commissioned by Ghost Foundation, Bangkok.

Rituals on Walking

Pan Daijing explores roughness and rawness by experimenting with noise as idea and material, in order for new sensations and energies to emerge. Often creating works within architectural interventions, for&nbsp;Ghost 2565, inspired by the emotional and historical intensity that reverberates underneath the city’s surface, her performance combines sound, movement, and other elements to evoke a haunting sonic, affective, and visual landscape that interacts with Bangkok as a site of contested forces.&nbsp; &nbsp; Pan references Walter Benjamin’s “Theses from the Philosophy of History” (1940), to focus on the moment one stares into the eye of history and meditate upon the collective amnesia imposed by those in power and the burden of failure under the guise of progress. Set in a location that stands as a reminder of one of many political and ideological shifts in the country, the environment in which the performance takes place is a generative interplay between performers, artist, audience, and now barren setting. The relational piece blurs the line between presentation and observation, all the while building up a form of shelter within and out of time in which anyone can get lost.&nbsp;&nbsp;Commissioned by Ghost Foundation, Bangkok.&nbsp;

Uncut

This ancestral home in Bangkok’s Chinatown—a community that faces gentrification—translates as “The House on the Beansprout Alley’’. Its third-generation Thai-Chinese owners are attempting to conserve and recollect the slowly disappearing architectural structure, reconfiguring its history. It housed five families at one point. The current owners' great-grandfather ran a jewelry business and their great-grandmother made their own brand of Nam Phrik Pao (chili paste) from under an old staircase in the courtyard. The building is treated not as a nostalgic object of study but a mode of living with it since part of it will remain for familial purposes. The question is one of inhabiting a space and a community, not through tearing down and building anew, but acknowledging the differences in function of the past and present and negotiating the space in between. Injected with a new creative impulse, the house remains amidst the symptoms of a disappearing vision of a city, where neighboring houses of the era are left in ruins waiting to be torn down and made into hostels and cafés.

Baan Trok Tua Ngork 

BANGKOK CITYCITY GALLERY is a contemporary art gallery located in Sathorn surrounded by foreign embassies and establishments. The old district of Chinese and European merchants continues to be an economic district extending from Charoen Krung. The gallery seeks to support emerging and established artists, giving voice to all artistic forms and ideas. They focus on engaged conversations and research through collaborations that support their exhibitions, talks, and bookshop curated to complement ongoing programs. Aspiring to support the spirit of youth, the gallery also encourages young practitioners to realize their own capacities in the long term. Apart from the gallery’s main programs, BANGKOK CITYCITY GALLERY co-founded the annual festival Bangkok Art Book Fair with STUDIO 150, and founded OPEN FIELD, a non-profit organization, to support knowledge production and contemporary culture with Ghost, a triennial video and performance series.

Bangkok CityCity Gallery

The shipbuilding company was founded in 1865 by Captain John Bush, harbor master of Bangkok. Seized by Japanese forces during the Pacific War for its strategic position, the dock was taken over by the Royal Thai Navy. Located on the Chao Phraya River, the main artery that sustains and expands the growth of Bangkok, historically those who control its passage in turn dominate the region’s narrative. Later changing hands once again, it was transferred to the Ministry of Finance and became a state enterprise. Following a failed coup, major naval operations were moved to Sattahip in Chonburi province, further signaling the tenuous relations of various military branches. The dry dock is currently under joint operation by the Ministry of Defense and state authorities for commercial and defense purposes, an amalgamation of constructing and repairing anything from battleships and patrol vessels to cargo transports, hinting at the complicated and often muddled relations of forces that seek to structure the city.

Bangkok Dock

Named after the founder of Siam Motors, Dr. Thaworn Phornprapha Auditorium is a three-hundred-seat auditorium designed specifically for acoustics. Hosting events from concerts to conferences to local and international audiences, the auditorium is in the corporation's head office, the Siam Motors building, one of the first international dealers in car manufacturing and engineering, in operation for over six decades.

Dr. Thaworn Phornprapha Auditorium

Initiated by FAAMAI (Fine and Applied Arts Multidisciplinary Art Innovation Program) with Chulalongkorn University Faculty of Fine and Applied Arts, the space is a 360-degree projection dome dedicated to the exploration and manifestation of digital arts and its ecosystem in the city. It sits next to Chulalongkorn University Centenary Park amidst the university’s rapid development of the Chula and Samyan area from a Thai-Chinese community into a university district filled with stores and student residences. The dome is in its final stages, being removed to make way for new structures after the exhibition.

FAAMAI Digital Arts Hub  

Jim Thompson Art Center is situated in the same compound as Jim Thompson House Museum. Recently opened to allow for more space and facilities, it serves as an exhibition venue, café, and library fostering a space of dialogue within the cultural community. The institution does not contain a collection but hosts guest-curated exhibitions along with events, seminars, lectures, and workshops. Named after James H.W. Thompson, an American businessman, ex-army officer, and ex-spy known for his opening up of the Thai Silk market during the Cold War, the foundation aims to nurture artistic activities and create public awareness of both contemporary and traditional arts within today’s context.&nbsp;

Jim Thompson Art Center

Established in 2016, Nova Contemporary aims to cultivate the reciprocal exchange of Thailand's contemporary art and culture with Southeast Asia and beyond. Showcasing both established and emerging artists through a diverse program of exhibitions and events—with a primary focus on Thai artists, Nova Contemporary brings art education to the general public and contributes to Thailand's ever-growing vibrant art community. Nova is situated in the Ratchadamri area, a bustling business district between Lumphini Park and the Royal Bangkok Sports Club, whose roads are lined with offices and hotels, a mark of the city’s shift in economic center that once ran along the river to the roads that lead inland.

Nova Contemporary

Various Locations

World Travel Service is Thailand’s first travel agency. It started over sixty years ago with its headquarters in Charoen Krung Road—the first paved road in Bangkok. Conceived to capitalize on the booming foreign market, it signaled the modernization of Bangkok’s Old Town, a district of trade and commerce first established to present a facade of the modern nation-state to the encroaching colonial powers. World Travel Service is symptomatic of the shifting landscape opening up to foreign investors, tourists, and labor, a narrative of a city in conflicted transition. It was originally positioned on a road that sustains the growing city in proximity to the recently closed Hua Lamphong train station, a terminal that connects and expands Bangkok’s presence and control over neighboring provinces. The area becomes a site of intersecting modes of travel and migration both through class and geography. A vision of a future now in stasis, it stands abandoned as a relic of narratives past.