From now till 3 May 2022, enjoy free admission to A Machine Boosting Energy Into the Universe by Korakrit Arunanondchai. Catch it before our galleries close for a refresh of exhibitions and reopen in end May.

"HD helps us come closer to the spiritual beings we long to meet,” Korakrit Arunanondchai observes. Spirits live through our videos and machines: phone cameras that capture sightings of mythical creatures, drones that act as ghostly eyes in the sky.

In A Machine Boosting Energy into the Universe, Korakrit explores the togetherness of human, machine, and spirit in 21st century Bangkok, a city where animistic energies and advanced technologies co-exist in everyday life. The exhibition centres around the artist’s iconic large-scale video installation, Painting with history in a room filled with people with funny names 3 (2015-16) from the Singapore Art Museum Collection. Visitors will enter an environment resembling a postapocalyptic wasteland, with used electronics, auto parts, and clothing that have been refashioned into cyborgian figures. Korakrit invites us to be together, not only among humans, but also in communion with machines and ghosts.

About the Artist
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. Arunanondchai’s first video in a series of work, 2012–2555 (2012), arose from the ideas of death, rebirth and the fictionalization of time and was shown at MoMA PS1 in New York (2014). Together with Arunanondchai’s twin brother Korapat Arunanondchai, the performance artist, boychild and artist Alex Gvojic, they produce a live performance to accompany the video installation as part of the Sunday Sessions at MoMA PS1. In 2015, He exhibited Painting with history in a room filled with people with funny names 3 at Palais de Tokyo, Paris and in 2016 exhibited as Arunanondchai’s first solo show at BANGKOK CITYCITY GALLERY. In early 2018, Arunanondchai co-founded Ghost Foundation, a non-profit organization aimed to support a video and performance art series in Thailand entitled Ghost. He curated its inaugural series, Ghost:2561, during October 11–28, 2018 in Bangkok.

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Hero image:
A Machine Boosting Energy Into the Universe (2021); image courtesy of the Artist.