Korakrit Arunanondchai. Songs for dying
The fourth scene of Fantastic Interior marks the end of a cycle of exhibitions that began a year ago and has run through the different moments that, in some way, construct the intimate story of a life, beginning with childhood and ending with death, and stopping everywhere in between.
In this final scene, Korakrit Arunanondchai (Bangkok, 1986) presents the video installation Songs for dying, in which the Thai artist looks at ways of seeing the world in which the relationship with death has a markedly personal and immediate character and is closely linked to life. In this space, situated between the material and the spiritual, between the here and the hereafter, and in the ways in which this space is narrated, Arunanondchai finds many of the hidden codes that serve to explain the real. He is thus able to create a visual collage in which various events occurring in different places and at different times are linked by a common figure: that of the ghost.
The ghost is represented as an allegory of what cannot be told and draws from Asian spirituality and animist religions. What is important is not whether the ghost exists or not, but the stories and narratives told through its figure, which inhabits the various places that Songs for dying traverses in different ways.
The artist’s own relationship with death and the spirituality of the ghost are also conveyed through the passing of his grandfather during the COVID-19 crisis, which is the starting point of the video: the artist shares the precise moment of his grandfather’s departure, in which he is invited to sing the dying man a song that will accompany him until his last moment in the world, since the sense of hearing is the last to disappear when we die. It is these songs, capable of connecting worlds and accompanying the processes of dematerialisation of the human spirit, that structure the narrative of the whole video, becoming chants that invoke the spirituality of the contemporary era, songs for order, songs for decomposition, songs for dreaming...
