6 April 2022

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Apichatpong is taking 'A Minor History' back to exhibit in the city in the northeast where he grew up | Max Crosbie-Jones

(Excerpt from original article here)

Last October Weerasethakul claimed to be experiencing a similar state of heightened lucidity in his homeland. The stance voiced publicly in 2015 – no more moviemaking in Thailand due to state censorship and the military-proxy government – had not changed, but his outlook had softened. “I don’t know about feature films here, but in terms of short films and different kind of expression, I feel very motivated,” he told me. What had activated him was a Thai explosion: the youth-led protest movement that shook the establishment in 2020 and 2021 with its strident and satire-inflected calls for far-reaching reforms that would, if enacted, stretch to the gilded pinnacle of society. Meanwhile, working in Colombia – a country that shares a ‘heavy history’ of cyclical political strife and asymmetric Communist war – had reminded him that Thailand is not unique, that flawed democracies are commonplace and utopias nowhere. “So you just need to focus on the beauty and gratefulness of everyday life,” he concluded before calling himself out. “It sounds very cliché.”

He was right to call himself out. But the fruits of Weerasethakul leaning anew into his local environment have hardly felt maudlin. In fact, A Minor History – the two-part exhibition at Bangkok’s 100 Tonson Foundation resulting from his roadtrip around the country’s northeast, Isaan, between pandemic lockdowns – surely ranks among the most abrasive and forthright chapters of his celebrated trenchwork: his dogged negotiation of Thailand’s psychogeography.

Part one of A Minor History was a Weerasethakul gallery show through and through – an immersive audiovisual experience – albeit one notable for its heralding a new collaboration with a pugnacious poet-activist, and its invocation of an extremely ‘heavy’ news story: the discovery of two murdered Thai anti-establishment dissidents in the Mekong River in December 2018. In the foyer, pictures of Asia’s third longest river were displayed upside down, while footage captured on his roadtrip formed the basis of a three-channel video installation in the main gallery. Scrolling slowly upwards on a double-sided vertical screen in the centre were elegiac shots of nocturnal Isaan: the moonlit Mekong, a neon wheel turning at a temple fair, a woman silhouetted against bedroom curtains, a microphone in a radio studio. This screen partially obscured two larger opposing screens further back, upon which flashed static shots of a crumbling cinema in the region’s Kalasin province.