PAST LIVES
Recent Video and Photography by Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Curated by Brian Curtin
Gallery Soulflower, Basement Level, Silom Galleria, Bangkok
2 September – 3 October 2009
Opening Reception and Book Launch:
Wednesday, 2 September, from 5.00pm
RSVP: Ms. Oui +662 630 0032
Gallery Soulflower is delighted to announce an exhibition of new works by the acclaimed filmmaker and artist Apichatpong Weerasethakul. A book detailing Weerasethakul’s oeuvre and edited by the art critic and curator Brian Curtin will be launched on the opening night.
Past Lives showcases a selection of videos from Weerasethakul’s current Primitive Project with a series of related photographs. Themes of memory and space, reincarnation and transformation, and the supernatural permeate the extraordinary visual rhetoric of Weerasethakul’s images. Inspired by a book written by a monk about a man who could recall his previous lives, Past Lives offers a substantial insight into the artist’s current exploration of aspects of political and cultural history in Thailand. The videos and photographs in Past Lives are based in the Thai village of Nabua, one the places the Thai army occupied from the 1960s to the early 1980s in order to curb so-called communist insurgents. Nabua is also part of a district famed for its legend of the ‘widow ghost’, a spirit that steals the souls of men as they sleep. Weerasethakul re-imagines this rural terrain in terms of memory and myth and reveals a portrait of contemporary lives illuminated by the spirits of history.
The accompanying book includes interviews by Brian Curtin and the writer Lawrence Chua and a specially commissioned essay by the Berlin-based academic Arnika Fuhrmann.
Gallery Soulflower
B1, Basement Level, The Silom Galleria, Soi Silom 19, Silom Road, Bangkok 10500, Thailand.
Phone: + 66-26300032, 860821573, 870302491
Fax: +66-26300032
