13 September 2021

copied

Apichatpong Weerasethakul's video exhibition 'A Minor History' turns myth and drama into a gesture of resistance | by Kong Rithdee

Photo Credit: A still image of an abandoned cinema in Kalasin, which is featured in the exhibition. Photo: Apichatpong Weerasethakul

"During the brief window last year when travelling was still possible, Apichatpong drove around the Isan provinces from Khon Kaen, where he grew up, to Nong Khai, Kalasin, Nakhon Phanom, Sakon Nakhon, Mukdahan, and Ubon Ratchathani. He filmed a deserted movie house in Kalasin, bare concrete and pockmarked walls colonised by unruly vines and pigeons. He interviewed the men from Mukdahan who discovered the bodies of the murdered dissidents in 2019. Violence and its scars, invisible or not, are a recurrent theme in several of Apichatpong's works, especially those set in the Northeast such as the "Primitive" project and Cemetery Of Splendour, but here we also detect something else: decay, decomposition, death, and how memories are deposited in cracks, dust, and earth. All of this seems like a thematic continuation from the feature film Memoria (which still awaits its Thailand premiere)"

READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE © Bangkok Post PCL. All rights reserved