Ghost Images

Korakrit Arunanondchai explores what the artist calls the ghost layer of images in this experimental screening program. Arunanondchai turns the Studio 1—Goodman venue into an atmospheric environment in which viewers are absorbed by cinematic gestures and proto-human forms. Footage moves in and out of visual clarity as images coalesce on clouds of fog and disperse into air.

The screening scenario also includes performance collaborators that emerge from and disappear into patches of darkness. Towards and away from legible figures, the audience experiences the dissolution of traditional film into pure atmosphere.

Arunanondchai’s artistic practice plumbs the depth of ritual, from everyday practices of cinema-going, to traditional spirituality in Southeast Asia, to the obsessive process of art-making itself. Past performances have taken elemental materials—heat, water—to dramatize the possession of spaces by their historical and sensorial ghosts.

For this work, possession is central—the overtaking of the artist by the work, the viewer by the image, the body by its environment. Arunanondchai’s project at EMPAC also draws on generative artificial intelligence to image chimeric, in-between forms that imagine speculative genealogies and formal affinities between different sorts of subjects, then re-projected as moving images. As he explores parallel, overlapping rhythms of East and West histories, Arnunanondchai’s work offers a vision of history as a sort of collective cinema that carries its own ghosts as it conjures new presents.