KORAKRIT ARUNANONDCHAI

“Will you find beauty in this sea of data?” Arunanondchai asks, in Thai, in the video, “we left it behind just for you.” In keeping with the previous three videos in his series Painting with history in a room filled with people with funny names, the artist engages a hypnotic epistolary exchange with the drone spirit Chantri, voiced in French by his mother, a language teacher. These missives pay homage to Chris Marker’s cine-essay Sans Soleil (1983) but also to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). Both similarly center on the urge to recreate, relive, revisit—to find intimacy with that which evades and, in so doing, holds power over us.
Annie Godfrey Larmon

Workshop for Peace/ Death of Pan
The series of vitrine sculptures built on top of an architecture model of the United Nation headquarters in New York came out of a few visits artist took at the UN site as researched and filming for the video With history in a room filled with people with funny names 4. Along the tour various “gifts to the UN” are exhibited. The Vitrines function partially as an imagined gift and an architectural proposal for the UN combining the UN, a social contract amongst various nations of the world, with an embodiment of the Greek god Pan, the root word for “panic.”

The blown glass orbs is programed to fade with an algorithm based upon “breathing”, the same breathing that is used to create the rhythm of the video, and also the same breathing that is in essence the song that Pan’s plays on his flute: a song of panic which allows the awareness of oneself alike a state of meditation, to find consciousness in the vertigo of the world.

Korakrit Arunanondchai studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, receiving his MFA from Columbia University just two years ago. Korakrit Arunanondchai has had solo exhibitions at CLEARING gallery; MoMA PS1, New York; Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing; S.M.A.K., Ghent; Museion, Bolzano; and KIASMA, Helsinki. His work has also been included in group exhibitions at ICA, London; SculptureCenter, New York; and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin. He also participated in the 9th Berlin Biennale and 20th Biennale of Sydney.