Apichatpong Weerasethakul
"Solarium"

Operating within the expansion of time and light, the work by Apichatpong Weerasethakul foreshadows an unsettling psyche that is relegated to the margins of our mind—a personal dream, an intimate family story, or a suppressed collective memory.

A childhood horror film serves as the inspiration for Weerasethakul’s new work Solarium (2023),^[1] an installation of two video channels projected over a glass structure. Recreating the 1981 Thai film, The Hollow-eyed Ghost, one of the videos portrays a man roaming in darkness search for his eyeballs, which have been stolen by a mad doctor in order to restore the sight to his blind wife. Ultimately, the man is destroyed by the rising Sun. The glass panels in which the videos are projected allows the ethereal specter to waft through the darkened room, pulsating off the screen into our physical realm. The artist remarks: “The ghost, like a filmmaker, is always in search for an apparatus to experience light. The ghost, unable to escape this dreamlike state, is forever confined in a solarium of his own creation, yearning for the warmth and light of the sunrise.”

This work also pays homage to experimental artists from the industrial revolution and early cinema, such as Hans Richter, Marcel Duchamp, and Fernand Léger, by delving into the study of geometry, light, perception, and movement.

Weerasethakul's series of drawings is also on display and is being exhibited publicly for the first time. These monochromatic expressions feature images from dreams, sketches, landscapes, and bodyscapes. They demonstrate the artist's preoccupation with shadows, obscurity, and cinematic frames. 

Also, on view is The Boxes of Time (2024), a collection of time manifestations. There are five boxes in the gallery, and each one has fifty-two images captured at various time compressions ranging from two minutes to one year. The photos inside each box convey a sense of mobility and change. Each box offers a perspective on how time can be experienced and perceived.

The exhibition “Solarium” marks the artist’s fifth solo presentation with the gallery in seven years.

^[1] The inaugural version of the installation Solarium is on view until April 30, 2024, at Bann Mae Ma School, Chiangå San, Chiang Rai, as part of Thailand Biennale, Chiang Rai 2023: The Open World, directed by Rirkrit Tiravanija and Gridthiya Gaweewong.
[Official website] https://www.thailandbiennale.org/