The Infringes film program brings together film works by international artists Aura Satz, Chulayarnnon Siriphol, Jiří Žák, Martha Atienza, Riar Rizaldi, Rhea Storr, and Sky Hopinka, presenting many of these films for the first time in Thailand. This curated collection of moving images explores the entanglements of myth, memory, and power, confronting the invisible yet pervasive forces that shape cultural and political landscapes. Set against the backdrop of a revived building, a former Thai educational publishing stronghold, the program prompts reflection on how knowledge, authority, and narratives can be intervened or infringed upon. Viewers are invited to engage with the dynamic interplay of past and present, asking how creative infringements can bring about new shared futures.

The one-hour-forty-minute program, running on a continuous loop, will be projected on a single screen, from Wednesday through Sunday, 14:00 to 20:00, at the Bangkok Kunsthalle from 23rd October to 22nd December 2024.

Program Statement:

Once the nation’s major publisher and disseminator of school textbooks, the Thai Watana Panich building now invites a different kind of engagement. Its dusty and black ashened walls, marked by time and history, offer a backdrop for possible exploration and questioning. In this space, Infringes becomes less about the building’s past influence and more about what it means to encounter a place that once held institutional power. What happens when art and film enter a space designed to control knowledge? How does the building’s history shape, or even resist, the narratives presented in these films? 

In considering these questions through a series of films that intervenes on inherited stories and accepted truths, Infringes proposes a rethinking of the relationship between power, space, history, and memory. The building itself becomes part of this inquiry, raising questions about how spaces, like narratives, can be repurposed and reimagined. 

The films selected for this program unsettle the boundaries between past and present, myth and memory. They foreground the complex mechanisms by which the past is controlled to sustain present-day hegemony. The works offer speculative interventions to reclaim agency and narrative autonomy and with the alchemy of vibrant sight and sound, each work offers, as Rhea Storr puts it, a way to "protest joyfully." In that spirit, the films provide a joyful disruption of dominant narratives, fostering potential for collective transformation where erased or suppressed voices and histories can be reclaimed. As an active reimagining of the shared futures that can emerge, let us infringe upon the familiar to open ourselves to new forms of communal knowledge and resistance.

— Komtouch Napattaloong, Infringes Curator

Works:

Chulayarnnon Siriphol’s Birth Of Golden Snail

Thailand, 2018, 20mins, silent, Courtesy of the artist

Birth of Golden Snail is a silent short film based on the history of Khao Kha Nab Nam, Krabi, Thailand during pre-historic and WWII times. It navigates the boundaries between fiction and folktale, which are filled with fantasy, and historical facts. It also plays with the physicality of a natural cave being transformed into a screening space and the internal spaces within the film. Similar to early cinema, using black and white film and film projector conveys a metaphor about the origin of early films and the origin of human beings; starting from the dark cave of motherhood into the illumination of the outer world. This film was produced on 16mm film, with the Khao Khanab Nam cave in Krabi as its backdrop. This film, once a part of Thailand Biennale Krabi 2018, was censored and banned due to its content being potentially against Thai peace, morality, national security, and dignity according to article 29 of the Film and Video Act 2008.

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Aura Satz’s While Smoke Signals

UK, 2023, 9mins, Courtesy of the artist

Shot in 2022 from the periphery of the Grangemouth Oil Refinery Complex - the oldest petrochemical refinery in the UK - While Smoke Signals is one chapter from Aura Satz’s debut feature-length project ‘Preemptive Listening’ (89 mins, 2024). The siren serves as a worldwide cipher of potential trauma, an emblem warning of climate catastrophe, and a mouthpiece for sonic governance and crisis management. Many sirens are relics from WW2 and the Cold War, repurposed to communicate the threats of extreme weather, a collective commemorative pause, or resurrected to test disaster preparedness. Through a soundtrack of new siren sounds composed by an array of experimental musicians, the wider project asks: Does an alarm have to be alarming? How can we counter alarm fatigue, both as a lived reality and as a metaphor for our current state? Can we envision sounds not only scored to immediacy but signals set to a longer temporal frame, sounding the alarm for the distant future, the cries on the cusp of ecological catastrophe? For this chapter, Satz returns to collaborate with musician, sound artist, and writer David Toop. The soundtrack evokes close-up sounds of flickering flames, gas emissions, and the echoes of laboring workers, drawing on decades of field recordings and improvisational collaborations. Commissioned by Tyneside Cinema for End/Future, supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

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Jiří Žák’s Unfinished Love Letter 

Czech Republic, 2020, 23mins, Courtesy of the artist

The film is an author’s collage of archival materials, documentary films from the 1960s and 1970s, which look at the activities of the then Czechoslovakia in Syria in a propagandistic way. It is a lyrical retelling of propaganda based on intuitive poetic starting points. Unfinished Love Letter is a more video-essayistic take on the Czechoslovak-Syrian relationships with the usage of archival footage which reflects its long history and also the bitter end which in the case of the Czech Republic means a negative approach to refugees coming to Europe, especially in the 2014-2017. An unwritten love letter about the end of a relationship.

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Riar Rizaldi’s Notes from Gog Magog

Indonesia, 2022, 20mins, Courtesy of the artist 

An exploration of the interconnection between ghost stories, tech company culture in South Korea, and the economy of logistics in Indonesia told through a notebook/premake film and dossier of an unmade techno-horror feature-length film set in between port in Jakarta and an unnamed employee assistance program office in Seoul.

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Rhea Storr’s A Protest, A Celebration, A Mixed Message

UK, 2018, 12mins, Courtesy of the artist and LUX London

Celebration is protest at Leeds West Indian Carnival. A look at forms of authority, ‘A Protest, A Celebration, A Mixed Message’ asks who performs and who spectates. Following Mama Dread’s, a troupe whose carnival theme is Caribbean immigration to the UK, we are asked to consider the visibility of black bodies, particularly in rural spaces. The film considers how easy it is to represent oneself culturally as a Mixed-race person in the UK and the ways in which Black bodies become visible, questioning ownership or appropriation of Black culture.

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Martha Atienza’s Anito

The Philippines, 2015, 9mins, Courtesy of the artist

An animistic festival Christianized and incorporated into Folk Catholicism slowly turns into modern day madness. The Ati-atihan festival means, "to be like Aetas" or "make believe Ati's." The Aeta people are thought to be among the earliest inhabitants of the Philippines, preceding the Austronesian migrations some 30,000 years ago. Through all influences throughout it's history, the Philippines is at another turning point of using the influences of ancestral belief, with their catholic religion together with their strive for survival, search for identity and need for creativity. All events important to community are shown including the passing of typhoon Yolanda (Haiyan), the pope, overseas workers and Manny Pacquiao. People take a day to step out of themselves and get connected to whatever they long to be. Inspired by their ancestors they become powerful, god-like and mad. Anito refers to ancestor spirits, nature spirits, and deities in the indigenous precolonial religions.

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Sky Hopinka’s I’ll Remember You As You Were, Not As What You’ll Become

USA, 2016, 13mins, Courtesy of the artist

An elegy to Diane Burns on the shapes of mortality, and being, and the forms the transcendent spirit takes while descending upon landscapes of life and death. A place for new mythologies to syncopate with deterritorialized movement and song, reifying old routes of reincarnation. Where resignation gives hope for another opportunity, another form, for a return to the vicissitudes of the living and all their refractions. “I’m from Oklahoma I ain’t got no one to call my own. If you will be my honey, I will be your sugar pie way hi ya way ya hi ya way ya hi yo” - Diane Burns (1957-2006)

Credits:
Curator: คมน์ธัช ณ พัทลุง Komtouch Napattaloong

Artists:  Aura Satz, Chulayarnnon Siripol, Jiří Žák, Martha Atienza, Riar Rizaldi, Rhea Storr, and Sky Hopinka

With support from LUX London

Exhibition Installers: Supernormal Studio

Thai Subtitles: รัชตะ ทองรวย Rachata Thongruay

Program Text Translator: ปริฉัตร ธนาภิวัฒนกูร Parichat Tanapiwattanakul

Founder: Marisa Chearavanont

Director: Stefano Rabolli Pansera

Exhibition Coordinators: Mark Chearavanont and Gemmica Sinthawalai

Booklet Design: Pu Kaewprasert and Pla Kaewprasert

Film details and images are provided by the artists and their representatives.

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Bangkok Kunsthalle in partnership with A4 Arts Foundation and Proyectoamil presents ‘Mend Piece’ by Yoko Ono. The 1960’s was a time of social change as well as the breaking of artistic conventions. From this wealth of intellectual and radical thought, Ono formed her early artistic practice. Conceived in 1966, ‘Mend Piece’ emerged as an early exploration of participatory art, challenging the very definition of what art can be.

In this work, Ono invites you to clear your mind, take a seat and mend the ceramic shards using the materials provided. Fundamental to the work is the notion of healing through communal mending – a practice in collective meditation and mindfulness. You, the visitor, become an agent in the creation of art, but more than that of healing. The mending of ceramic then becomes an analogue for the mending of all things, both tangible or intangible, personal or universal.

In the context of Bangkok Kunsthalle, ‘Mend Piece’ takes on new meaning. The themes of mending and collectivity form the crux of Bangkok Kunsthalle’s program: mending an abandoned building, strengthening the local community and uniting disparate individuals. The work references the Japanese practice of “kintsugi” or the art of repairing broken pottery with metallic lacquer. The underlying philosophy of “kintsugi” is an embracing of an object’s flaws and history, echoed by the physical situation of the work in a formerly abandoned printing house.

There is a strong similarity between how one recalls a dream, a memory and a film. This overlap is where Korakrit Arunanondchai forms his filmic compositions. Here, there is a possibility for different registers of lived experiences to combine with each other to go beyond themselves. Time is a primary subject and material for Arunanondchai. For him, time is held and experienced through the body, both as an individual and as a collective. 

“nostalgia for unity” marks a turning point in Arunanondchai’s practice, where negative space is the primary medium of the exhibition. The installation is a painting, a film, a stage and a script that activates absences: the absent figure in this work is a Phoenix. The script for the film acts as a threshold between what is permitted and what cannot be addressed, between different timescales and between people and things we cannot see, but want to believe exist. These words are the portal to give life back to the ashes. 

Prayers are incantations, forms activated by intent. That intent is both a historical image as well as a speculative one. Does a prayer activate an event? Or is it the event itself? Perhaps prayer, especially in collectivity, is inherently a break in time because it connects different timescales — the past with the present, and the future with all that has fallen. The Phoenix gathers its ashes along with those that came before it, becomes ablaze and takes the spark of fire from the ground to light up the sky. Inherent to its nature is the promise of renewal, and perhaps a collective transcendence through death itself. A death with a promise of reincarnation. 

Unanswered prayers construct a negative space of potentiality. The failure of those potentials to come into fruition is also the limit where spirituality lies. Arunanondchai’s work is not about possibilities, but rather impossibilities. And it is within these exact impossibilities that he generates images. Renewal is not a seamless process; it reverberates, it splits off. To pray is also to refuse the idea that one can pick their fate consciously. 

In this exhibition, Korakrit Arunanondchai (born 1986 in Bangkok, Thailand) returns to some of his enduring themes: the coincidence of beginning and end, the simultaneity of decay and rebirth, the correspondence between individual enlightenment and shared spirituality. He draws on both the story relations of animism and the spiritual features of a church to create a participatory space where the elements of prayer, intent and event are connected through the bodies of the audience moving through the space.

The work is inspired by the history of the building of Thai Wattanapanich, a printing house that printed school books that were used when he was a student, up until the early 2000s when the building was destroyed in a fire. He sees this architecture as a body of a giant, decomposing in time. At the heart of this body, the artist reconstitutes the ashes from the fire into a mass that resembles a stage. A prayer text protrudes from the floor. The light in the room, slightly tinted through stained glass and haze, resembles the color of the unbreathable air we all know too well from science-fiction and present reality. 

Even though negative space is the medium, that is not to say this installation is without a sense of volume. The sound in the room divides the space into 3 distinct layers, one of the underworld, one from the sky above, and an earthly layer that links the ground to the sky through a performative ritual that was enacted in the space, prior in time. These invisible performers work together to generate heat for the phoenix. Afterwards, their negative presence haunts the space. 

The elements of the installation become parameters set into motion by the artist, a point of departure towards a network of negative spaces. What is not tangible, not realized and not possible becomes both the agents of the installation and the site in which Arunanondchai operates. It is in this exact negative domain where the artist’s spirituality and art manifests itself. At the heart of this void is the Phoenix, the absent protagonist. It promises death, but also rebirth in an eternal cycle of potentiality. Its ashes are both a symbol of what is gone and what is yet to come.

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

Bangkok born, Korakrit Arunanondchai is a visual artist and filmmaker who is currently based in New York and Bangkok. His Recent solo exhibitions include: Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2022), Art Sonje Center, Seoul (2022), Singapore Art Museum, Singapore (2022), Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst (2021), Serralves Museum, Porto (2020), Secession, Vienna (2019). Arunanondchai’s work has been presented at numerous biennials and festivals, with recent presentations at the Thailand Biennale, Chiang Rai(2023), Kathmandu Triennale (2022), Gwangju Biennial (2021), Yokohama Triennial (2020), the Venice Biennale (2019) and the Whitney Biennial (2019)

In early 2018, Arunanondchai co-founded “Ghost”, a time based media festival that happens every 3 years in Bangkok. He curated its inaugural series, Ghost:2561, in 2018, and organized the second edition Ghost:2565 in 2022.

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Michel Auder (born 1944 in Soissons, France) is a filmmaker who has been creating experimental movies and video art since the late 1960s. Auder is a poet of visual observation— his films bear an affinity to literary forms and can best be described as filmic poetry. He is known for his non-linear and non-narrative style, capturing his life and the lives of those around him in an intimate and fragmented manner. 

Auder's work often blurs the lines between art, documentation, and personal narrative, the diaristic and oneiric. Throughout his career, he has produced a significant body of work ranging from fictional narratives to personal documentaries. Auder's early adoption of the portable video camera allowed him to document the everyday phenomena of his own private experiences, with a directness that was revolutionary at the time and that is still radical after many decades. 

In New York he was involved with Andy Warhol's Factory and became a participant-observer of the New York social scene, capturing footage of many of the personalities and events associated with it. This connection led to a video archive of thousands of hours that offers a unique perspective on this period of American art history.

Over the decades, Auder has continued to work consistently exploring the potential of video as a medium. Through his works, Auder builds a connection between the personal and the universal. He allows viewers to see the world through his eyes, sharing experiences that range from banal to extraordinary. Through the intimate use of the filmic medium, Auder questions the nature of time and memory, juxtaposing real and fictional, perception and representation, intimate and exposed. 

The selection of works presented in Bangkok Kunsthalle, unfolds along two interwoven trajectories: five works on Nature and nine works on the evolution of Auder’s oeuvre through different genres.

In the first group of works, Michel Auder often describes his relationship to Nature in terms of time. He explains how the representation of Nature necessitated the invention of a specific editing technique in order to accommodate the nuanced temporality of natural phenomena. In his seminal film ‘Voyage to the Centre of the Phone Lines’, (1993), Michel Auder juxtaposes covert recordings of anonymous mobile-phone conversations with a seascape— sand, water, the sun, the moon, wandering birds, not a human in sight. The images evoke an accepted universality of the timeless natural world, while the audio evokes a sense of mundanity and futility, a Joycean smattering of human drama and banality. People fret obsessively to one another about their personal lives, their frailties, the anxiety in their voices revealing their inchoate sense of mortality. ‘Domaine de la Nature’ (2023) is a collage of natural scenery employing extensive long pans and a slow rhythm. ‘I am So Jealous of Birds II’ (2011) is a ‘video haiku’ of New York City birds. Finally, ‘Flowers of Thailand’ (2023) is a two-screen installation, produced in Bangkok, which evokes an epistolary correspondence between form and colour.

In the second group of works, a selection of chronicles, travelogues, diaries, video portraits, video poems and intimate recollections reveal Michel Auder’s predilection for modes of editing and filming that enable multiple narratives to emerge. ‘Bangkok Yaowarat’ (2023) depicts a daily scene of Bangkok streetlife, a voluntary choreography of people and commodities that are perfectly synchronized. Video portraits of artists such as ‘Cindy Sherman’ (1988), ‘Florence’ (1975) and ‘Alice Neel Painting Margaret’ (1978 ed.2009) constitute extraordinary poetic documentations of the creative process of artists in their studios.

Auder’s videos often take the form of intimate correspondences to impossible interlocutors such as ‘Heads of Town’ (2009). At times, his works take the form of collages, adopting the rhythmic structure of music and poetry such as ‘Van Gogh’ (2023), ‘Gemälde 2’ (2011, ed. 2019) or ‘Bangkok City’ (2023). ‘DAUGHTERS’ (2023) is an installation which is shown for the first time. It combines two videos: ‘Talking Head’ (1976)  an intimate documentation of the artist’s daughter talking to herself, and ‘DAUGHTERS’ (2023) a work which subtly inverts the relationship between foreground and background while the voiceover and words by Natalie Brück assigns a simultaneously menacing and seductive sonic element to it. 

Michel Auder’s work has been shown in numerous exhibitions at galleries and museums internationally, including solo shows and retrospectives in Moma PS1 (New York, USA), documenta 14 (Kassel, Athens), 2014 Whitney Biennial (New York, USA), Frans Hals Museum (Haarlem, The Netherlands), Fondation Vincent Van Gogh (Arles, France), documenta 13 (Kassel, Germany), Museum Ludwig (Cologne, Germany) and Kunsthalle Basel (Basel, Switzerland). His work is represented in public collections internationally, including Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris, France), FRAC Provence-Alpes-Côtes d’Azur (Marseille, France), Kadist Art Foundation (Paris, France) and Muhka (Antwerp, Germany), ICA (Miami, USA) amongst others.

Curator Statement
Recording, Replaying, Recollecting:
A journey through the works of Michel Auder
By Stefano Rabolli Pansera

“Thus let your Streams o’reflow your Springs,
Till Eyes and Tears be the same things:
And each the other’s difference bears;
These weeping Eyes, those seeing Tears.”
Eyes and Tears by Andrew Marvell

Michel Auder sees life. He sees the world, observes the people, stares at the countless events of the everyday. His intense gaze spots details that generally pass unnoticed: the witty expression of a passerby, the texture of the petals of the flowers, the unconscious choreography of metropolitan life, the slow movement of the clouds, the flickering images on a TV screen. 

Fundamentally, Michel Auder is an assiduous visual chronicler who has documented and shared his life and observations through the medium of video. 
“I'm not really keeping a diary, rather I use the diaristic form and the documentary form, but I manipulate them." Auder insists. 
As a matter of fact, the manipulation and examination of these forms engage two of video’s inherent properties: intimacy and time. 

Seeing is the main expression of Auder’s practice. In his oeuvre, seeing is both the act of observing and the act of recording. In this sense, his gaze is oblique and persistent. 

‘Oblique’ in the sense that he turns his attention to the details that are at the very margins of the action, indulging the peripheral aspects often neglected. Such a radical displacement of the focus from the object to the background allows accessing life in a very intimate way, as if the artist is enchanted by the very existence of things: a sort of artistic animism. 

‘Persistent’ because Michel Auder lives with his camera and obsessively records most of the moments of his life, he films and then watches and re-watches the clips, refines his gaze, works on the sequences, edits the reels, crops the frames and manipulates the cuts. As Jonas Mekas, one of Michel’s long-lasting supporters and friends, recalls "When I used to go visit Michel at the Chelsea hotel, around 1970, the video camera was always there, always going, a part of the house, a part of his life, eyes, hands. It still is. A most magnificent love affair– no, not an affair: a life’s obsession."

As the title of one of his early works, ‘Keeping Busy’ (1969) suggests, his art creates a cohesive structure out of a flurry of uncomposed moments, out of the disorder of time, out of all of the things that dissolve when we are busy making plans. 

The intensity of his gaze offers an intimate encounter with what he reveals. There is no distance from what he discloses, but proximity, bordering on physical contact with the subjects that he films.

Michel Auder is an observer of life in its splendour and squalor. In quantum physics, the observation becomes indistinguishable from what is being perceived, as there is no ‘total’ or ‘impartial’ observer. Far from being an impartial observer, Michel Auder is complicit with the life that it represents, he is deeply entangled in its dynamics and in its destiny. 

This is the reason why Auder’s films are inextricably bound up with his own life: he is a rebel, and his gaze is itself a subversive act. 

At once poetic and critical, cruel and confessional, Michel Auder’s casually virtuosic videos have for over five decades disrupted traditional perceptual habits of moviegoers and art audiences alike, subverting notions of filmic narrative and processes. Employing new video formats as they become available (from analogue film to mobile phone), Auder has produced short and feature films, video installations and photography that transgress genres, borrowing from art history, literature, commercial television, and experimental cinema.

Born in Soissons in the north of France in 1944, where he spent his solitary childhood, Auder moved to Paris in the late fifties where he trained as a commercial fashion photographer and began making films in the early 1960s. 

In 1963, he was drafted to the French Army and was sent to Algeria as a combat photographer. A true rebel, Auder spent three months of his conscription in a military jail for refusing his duties.

Upon his return to Paris, Auder found inspiration in the films of Jean Luc Godard and garnered support as a filmmaker from the leftist film collective Zanzibar Group. Thus marked the beginnings of his long running career as a video artist. 

After having purchased a Sony Portapak, the first portable video camera, he discovered a way of filmmaking without scripts and sets, he simply carried his camera around with him, adopting the ethos of ‘the world as my set and people as my actors’.

At the end of the 1960s and for most of the 1970s he lived in Chelsea Hotel in New York City. A chance encounter with Andy Warhol emboldened his own self-taught approach to multimedia art and acquainted him with Warhol’s network of artists, models, actors including Susan Hoffmann, known to him and most others as ‘Viva’, the name that Andy Warhol had given her, and whom Auder married in Las Vegas soon after.

Auder’s early films already contain most of the traits of his mature style: they are fragmented, layered videos that document everyday existence. The films are non-narrative and non-sequential as they are cut between various locations and combine different scenes that appear unrelated. The artist began letting his camera roll on friends, family, strangers, and his environment and soon developed a practice of near-constant filming. 

The resulting thousands of hours of footage—shot on devices ranging from the first portable recorders to mobile phone cameras—include biographical portraits, travelogues, and images shot directly from television screens. 

In his only feature film, ‘Cleopatra’ (1970), filmed on 16mm and 35mm film and extravagantly ambitious in scale, Auder foreshadowed his future decades of making art out of his own lived experience. In fact, the production ended up catastrophically as the producer cut the financial support and a copy of the film, screened at Cannes Film Festival, was withdrawn from public distribution. Michel Auder soon realised that he had to reject the standard structures of production and distribution of the film industry to pursue his own rigorous, personal language based on personal intuition and improvisation.

Since moving to New York and becoming part of the scene which centred on Andy Warhol’s Factory, Auder focused on his life’s obsession: recording life on video. 

He observes life through thousands of hours of video recordings. Each of these observations are saved to a vast bank of images that are – sometimes much later – reviewed and edited into new films. It’s an ongoing and seemingly continuous project that has in recent years been shaped by Auder’s use of his smartphone as an artistic tool. Again, his art and his life are intimately interwoven.

The archive of footage he has amassed, and continues to collect, provides the source material from which he creates the individual works. 

While a few works were formed completely in-camera, most have been edited for years, and sometimes decades, after the original footage was shot. As time passes, certain situations, people, and images are revisited, edited, and released from the archive. His process of recollection is not about retrieval of the past as such, nor it is about refugees of a nostalgic past as much as it is about re-telling the past in new potential narratives.

In doing so, he undermines the processes of memory in the form of creative reappropriation: retrospectively examining events in the past and searching for a visual vocabulary to tell new stories. 

Not only is the gaze oblique and persistent, but even the editing process is deferred and nuanced. In fact, Auder describes a very personal approach to traversing his immense video archive: he watches his own footage as if his gaze is turning towards his own vision. 

He constantly reconfigures his vast archive of visual information. He further elaborates on this process: "I try not to deal with the material as soon as it’s made. It’s only years later that I deal with the material. I store it up. I wait until I can look at it.” Auder continues: “That’s why I keep all my work, not because I think it’s great but because I had some kind of calling to shoot every minute of it. There’s no reason for me to erase it even if it looks bad. Experience has told me that I can look back twenty years later and find something interesting. I was smart enough to understand that things get older, and the meanings change.” 

Such an anachronistic approach to editing provides the artist with the critical distance necessary to edit the footage. Furthermore, it provides the freedom to use the existing recordings for new stories and unexpected narratives. Auder’s method vaguely resembles Freud’s description of ‘afterwardsness’: the retroactive understanding of experiences, impressions, or memory whose traces are altered after the fact because of new experiences. 

This concept becomes a method of editing in Michel Auder’s practice. It allows him to produce new, even unexpected effects and meaning out of the same historic footage. 

He combines recently filmed video and new edits of previously shown material until the concept of linear time evaporates, and the past coexists with the present. 

In his attempt to negotiate between memory and duration, recollection and deferral, the re-presentation of the past is neither nostalgic nor idealised. 

The past is simply recorded footage, a “given reel” available to be edited to generate new stories. Auder explains “The past is now. I have no regret; it is simply the available footage that I can use. There is no difference in time between events. The past is past, and memories are just frames on a reel”.

This strategy of overlapping, simultaneity and the overall alteration of syntax creates the powerful sensation of having time and momentum perceptually altered.

During the 1980s, Auder developed several video works that utilize television by appropriating and then reconfiguring footage shot directly from a domestic television screen. 

In a world dominated by mass-media, life is ceaselessly televised and processed, and can be accessed through the screen. 

Therefore, Michel watches the videos as a source of the life that he recollects.

The works produced in this period demonstrate Auder’s creative and pioneering use of scratch, montage, and experimental sound techniques. Likewise, the focus on broadcasted mass-media extended the artist’s long-running examination of the medium of video and forms of representation.

Being able to control the past may mean being in control of the present self. Yet, Auder’s model privileges the opacity of past, present, and memory. He constantly reminds us of the irremediable breach between experience, recollection and its externalized representation. Experience is always reconstructed in memory, and memories are not pure representations. Considering the filmic strategies and overall style Auder has developed, we can see how he, in fact, highlights the tensions between memory and forgetting, recollection and narration, preservation and erasure. 

This tension becomes even more powerful with Auder’s recent works that respond to the new forms of mass voyeurism as exemplified in the explosive proliferation of reality-based digital media. 

Auder explains his fascination with more recent developments in film as follows: “By the year 2000, we all became filmmakers, mostly for the worse and in some cases for the better. We all have a digital tool, or two, in our pockets. By using these recording devices new authors have emerged, telling stories like never before; Film Novelists, Film Playwrights, Film Poets, Film Essayists, Film Painters, Film Biographers, Film Columnists, Film Reporters, Film Animators, Film Wordsmiths, Film Scribes, Film Sculptors, Film Scribblers...”

With “Endless Column” (2011) Michel started directly using the pictures recorded on his mobile phone and adopted a new method of paratactic editing, with sequences of still images compiled without hierarchy, with no overlapping nor effects. 

These brutally non-mediated and intimate chronicles reveal the contradictions, gaps and paradoxes involved in trying to make film represent real life experience and highlight how the language of moving images suspends us within systems of watching and being watched that are simultaneously intimate and distant, nostalgic and emotionally detached.

Even when confronted with these new modes of seeing and recording, Auder’s gaze focuses on the unexpected gestures, the expressions, the situations and all the unexpected details that fade away while we are busy living our lives. 

He grasps these moments that we often forget to pay attention to, when joy is more ephemeral, and melancholy is more intense. 

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Richard Long (b. 1945, Bristol, UK) 

Long transforms his journeys into works of art. Walking is a process and an artwork at the same time. In 2000 he would say: “My intention was to make a new art which was also a new way of walking: walking as art.”

On his walks, Richard Long might gather natural elements that he transforms into a trace-work of art.

Richard Long invites us to experience art differently: in a spiritual and meditative way. There is a natural power within his work which resembles total harmony or a kind of Buddhism.

Major Exhibitions:
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA
Documenta 5 and 7, Kassel, Germany

Elmgreen & Dragset (b. 1961, Copenhagen, Denmark; b. 1969 Trondheim, Norway)

The Scandinavian duo are known for their installations that examine society through an absurdist lens. In Khao Yai Art Forest, they use the tool of paradox and displacement to cast a new perspective on the notion of nature.

Their special commissioned bar “K-BAR” for Khao Yai Art is dedicated to Martin Kippenberger, a notorious alcoholic German painter who died in 1997 from alcohol-related health complications. The presence of a small functioning bar, which opens only once a month, is an expression of urban luxury and refinement displaced in the the forest.

Major Exhibitions:
Tate Modern, London, UK
Victoria & Albert Museum, London, UK
Fondazione Prada, Milan, Italy

Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook (b. 1957, Trat, Thailand)

Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook is one of Southeast Asia’s most respected
contemporary artists. For over thirty years, her video, installation, and graphic works have been showcased globally.

Born in Trat, Thailand, in 1957, Araya earned fine art degrees from
Silpakorn University in Bangkok and Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig. Her early etchings and aquatints, depicting ghost-like
female figures, introduced enduring themes of death, the body, and women’s experiences. Influenced by her mother’s early death and
societal constraints on women, her work evolved to focus on the
physicality of the body and sculptural installations by the early 1990s.

Major Exhibitions:
The Venice Biennale
Documenta
The Sculpture Center in New York
North Carolina Museum of Art

Francesco Arena (b. 1978, Brindisi, Italy)

Arena is an Italian artist based in Bari, Italy. Arena’s research explores both collective and personal history. In his performances, installations, and sculptures, narratives shape the objects, which range from everyday items like furniture and diaries to traditional materials such as marble, slate, and bronze.

Arena’s sculpture for Khao Yai Art has the word “GOD” carved into two large stones. One stone has the letters “G” and “D,” and the other has “O.” When joined, the word “GOD” becomes invisible, symbolizing its intangible nature. Although not as large as Thai Buddhas, the artwork is heavy and full, preserving the word within it. It exists in its own space and time, installed in the forest.

Major Exhibitions:
55th Venice Biennale
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland
MAXXI National Museum of 21st Century Art, Rome, Italy
Museo Madre, Naples

Richard Nonas (b. 1936, New York, USA)

Nonas is a sculptor and an anthropologist. Richard Nonas’ sculptures
constitute spatial markers to define and constitute a place.

Nonas’ post-minimalist sculptural practice addresses notions of space, place and deep time. He is known for his modular sculptural installations, primarily in stone or wood in exterior and interior settings. His approach to minimalism maintains a sense of self containment and timelessness.

Major Exhibitions:
MoMA, New York
LA Louver Gallery, California, USA
MAXXI National Museum of 21st Century Art, Rome Italy
MASS MoCA, Massachusetts, USA

Louise Bourgeois (b. 1911, Paris, France)

Maman, the most iconic Bourgeois sculpture, represents a spider as the symbol of the maternal figure. It is a cage and a nest at the same time. In Bourgeois’ words, the spider is the animal that constantly repairs the web. Maman, therefore, represents the patience of repairing and the care of healing wounds. 

In the context of Khao Yai Art Forest, Maman alludes to this specific attitude of repairing and healing nature. Like a spider we must weave again our relationship with nature which is our mother and our home.

Major Exhibitions:
Tate Modern, UK
Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain
Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan
Qatar National Convention Center, Doha, Qatar

Fujiko Nakaya (b. 1933, Sapporo, Japan) 

Nakaya is a Japanese artist, a member of Experiments in Art and Technology, and a supporter and practitioner of Japanese video art. Nakaya was born in Sapporo where her father, Ukichiro Nakaya, who is credited with make the first artificial snowflakes, was a professor at Hokkaido University. Nakaya is most widely known for her fog sculptures which represent a new type of land art. Her works are not based on imposing a structure on to nature, but represent making the invisible become visible, poetically melding art and science with nature.

Landscape Design by Atsushi Kitagawara Architects - Angel Estevez
Since the installation at Showa Memorial Park, Kitagawara has been collaborating with Fujiko Nakaya alongside his architectural practice. AKA team, led by Angel Estevez, worked with Fujiko Nakaya to create the Fog Forest landscape in Khao Yai.

Major Exhibitions:
World Fair Expo, Osaka
Grand Palais, Paris, France
Mori Art Museum, Japan
Himeji City Museum of Art
Fondation Beyeler

The Infringes film program brings together film works by international artists Aura Satz, Chulayarnnon Siriphol, Jiří Žák, Martha Atienza, Riar Rizaldi, Rhea Storr, and Sky Hopinka, presenting many of these films for the first time in Thailand. This curated collection of moving images explores the entanglements of myth, memory, and power, confronting the invisible yet pervasive forces that shape cultural and political landscapes. Set against the backdrop of a revived building, a former Thai educational publishing stronghold, the program prompts reflection on how knowledge, authority, and narratives can be intervened or infringed upon. Viewers are invited to engage with the dynamic interplay of past and present, asking how creative infringements can bring about new shared futures.

The one-hour-forty-minute program, running on a continuous loop, will be projected on a single screen, from Wednesday through Sunday, 14:00 to 20:00, at the Bangkok Kunsthalle from 23rd October to 22nd December 2024.

Program Statement:

Once the nation’s major publisher and disseminator of school textbooks, the Thai Watana Panich building now invites a different kind of engagement. Its dusty and black ashened walls, marked by time and history, offer a backdrop for possible exploration and questioning. In this space, Infringes becomes less about the building’s past influence and more about what it means to encounter a place that once held institutional power. What happens when art and film enter a space designed to control knowledge? How does the building’s history shape, or even resist, the narratives presented in these films? 

In considering these questions through a series of films that intervenes on inherited stories and accepted truths, Infringes proposes a rethinking of the relationship between power, space, history, and memory. The building itself becomes part of this inquiry, raising questions about how spaces, like narratives, can be repurposed and reimagined. 

The films selected for this program unsettle the boundaries between past and present, myth and memory. They foreground the complex mechanisms by which the past is controlled to sustain present-day hegemony. The works offer speculative interventions to reclaim agency and narrative autonomy and with the alchemy of vibrant sight and sound, each work offers, as Rhea Storr puts it, a way to "protest joyfully." In that spirit, the films provide a joyful disruption of dominant narratives, fostering potential for collective transformation where erased or suppressed voices and histories can be reclaimed. As an active reimagining of the shared futures that can emerge, let us infringe upon the familiar to open ourselves to new forms of communal knowledge and resistance.

— Komtouch Napattaloong, Infringes Curator

Works:

Chulayarnnon Siriphol’s Birth Of Golden Snail

Thailand, 2018, 20mins, silent, Courtesy of the artist

Birth of Golden Snail is a silent short film based on the history of Khao Kha Nab Nam, Krabi, Thailand during pre-historic and WWII times. It navigates the boundaries between fiction and folktale, which are filled with fantasy, and historical facts. It also plays with the physicality of a natural cave being transformed into a screening space and the internal spaces within the film. Similar to early cinema, using black and white film and film projector conveys a metaphor about the origin of early films and the origin of human beings; starting from the dark cave of motherhood into the illumination of the outer world. This film was produced on 16mm film, with the Khao Khanab Nam cave in Krabi as its backdrop. This film, once a part of Thailand Biennale Krabi 2018, was censored and banned due to its content being potentially against Thai peace, morality, national security, and dignity according to article 29 of the Film and Video Act 2008.

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Aura Satz’s While Smoke Signals

UK, 2023, 9mins, Courtesy of the artist

Shot in 2022 from the periphery of the Grangemouth Oil Refinery Complex - the oldest petrochemical refinery in the UK - While Smoke Signals is one chapter from Aura Satz’s debut feature-length project ‘Preemptive Listening’ (89 mins, 2024). The siren serves as a worldwide cipher of potential trauma, an emblem warning of climate catastrophe, and a mouthpiece for sonic governance and crisis management. Many sirens are relics from WW2 and the Cold War, repurposed to communicate the threats of extreme weather, a collective commemorative pause, or resurrected to test disaster preparedness. Through a soundtrack of new siren sounds composed by an array of experimental musicians, the wider project asks: Does an alarm have to be alarming? How can we counter alarm fatigue, both as a lived reality and as a metaphor for our current state? Can we envision sounds not only scored to immediacy but signals set to a longer temporal frame, sounding the alarm for the distant future, the cries on the cusp of ecological catastrophe? For this chapter, Satz returns to collaborate with musician, sound artist, and writer David Toop. The soundtrack evokes close-up sounds of flickering flames, gas emissions, and the echoes of laboring workers, drawing on decades of field recordings and improvisational collaborations. Commissioned by Tyneside Cinema for End/Future, supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

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Jiří Žák’s Unfinished Love Letter 

Czech Republic, 2020, 23mins, Courtesy of the artist

The film is an author’s collage of archival materials, documentary films from the 1960s and 1970s, which look at the activities of the then Czechoslovakia in Syria in a propagandistic way. It is a lyrical retelling of propaganda based on intuitive poetic starting points. Unfinished Love Letter is a more video-essayistic take on the Czechoslovak-Syrian relationships with the usage of archival footage which reflects its long history and also the bitter end which in the case of the Czech Republic means a negative approach to refugees coming to Europe, especially in the 2014-2017. An unwritten love letter about the end of a relationship.

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Riar Rizaldi’s Notes from Gog Magog

Indonesia, 2022, 20mins, Courtesy of the artist 

An exploration of the interconnection between ghost stories, tech company culture in South Korea, and the economy of logistics in Indonesia told through a notebook/premake film and dossier of an unmade techno-horror feature-length film set in between port in Jakarta and an unnamed employee assistance program office in Seoul.

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Rhea Storr’s A Protest, A Celebration, A Mixed Message

UK, 2018, 12mins, Courtesy of the artist and LUX London

Celebration is protest at Leeds West Indian Carnival. A look at forms of authority, ‘A Protest, A Celebration, A Mixed Message’ asks who performs and who spectates. Following Mama Dread’s, a troupe whose carnival theme is Caribbean immigration to the UK, we are asked to consider the visibility of black bodies, particularly in rural spaces. The film considers how easy it is to represent oneself culturally as a Mixed-race person in the UK and the ways in which Black bodies become visible, questioning ownership or appropriation of Black culture.

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Martha Atienza’s Anito

The Philippines, 2015, 9mins, Courtesy of the artist

An animistic festival Christianized and incorporated into Folk Catholicism slowly turns into modern day madness. The Ati-atihan festival means, "to be like Aetas" or "make believe Ati's." The Aeta people are thought to be among the earliest inhabitants of the Philippines, preceding the Austronesian migrations some 30,000 years ago. Through all influences throughout it's history, the Philippines is at another turning point of using the influences of ancestral belief, with their catholic religion together with their strive for survival, search for identity and need for creativity. All events important to community are shown including the passing of typhoon Yolanda (Haiyan), the pope, overseas workers and Manny Pacquiao. People take a day to step out of themselves and get connected to whatever they long to be. Inspired by their ancestors they become powerful, god-like and mad. Anito refers to ancestor spirits, nature spirits, and deities in the indigenous precolonial religions.

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Sky Hopinka’s I’ll Remember You As You Were, Not As What You’ll Become

USA, 2016, 13mins, Courtesy of the artist

An elegy to Diane Burns on the shapes of mortality, and being, and the forms the transcendent spirit takes while descending upon landscapes of life and death. A place for new mythologies to syncopate with deterritorialized movement and song, reifying old routes of reincarnation. Where resignation gives hope for another opportunity, another form, for a return to the vicissitudes of the living and all their refractions. “I’m from Oklahoma I ain’t got no one to call my own. If you will be my honey, I will be your sugar pie way hi ya way ya hi ya way ya hi yo” - Diane Burns (1957-2006)

Credits:
Curator: คมน์ธัช ณ พัทลุง Komtouch Napattaloong

Artists:  Aura Satz, Chulayarnnon Siripol, Jiří Žák, Martha Atienza, Riar Rizaldi, Rhea Storr, and Sky Hopinka

With support from LUX London

Exhibition Installers: Supernormal Studio

Thai Subtitles: รัชตะ ทองรวย Rachata Thongruay

Program Text Translator: ปริฉัตร ธนาภิวัฒนกูร Parichat Tanapiwattanakul

Founder: Marisa Chearavanont

Director: Stefano Rabolli Pansera

Exhibition Coordinators: Mark Chearavanont and Gemmica Sinthawalai

Booklet Design: Pu Kaewprasert and Pla Kaewprasert

Film details and images are provided by the artists and their representatives.

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Bangkok Kunsthalle in partnership with A4 Arts Foundation and Proyectoamil presents ‘Mend Piece’ by Yoko Ono. The 1960’s was a time of social change as well as the breaking of artistic conventions. From this wealth of intellectual and radical thought, Ono formed her early artistic practice. Conceived in 1966, ‘Mend Piece’ emerged as an early exploration of participatory art, challenging the very definition of what art can be.

In this work, Ono invites you to clear your mind, take a seat and mend the ceramic shards using the materials provided. Fundamental to the work is the notion of healing through communal mending – a practice in collective meditation and mindfulness. You, the visitor, become an agent in the creation of art, but more than that of healing. The mending of ceramic then becomes an analogue for the mending of all things, both tangible or intangible, personal or universal.

In the context of Bangkok Kunsthalle, ‘Mend Piece’ takes on new meaning. The themes of mending and collectivity form the crux of Bangkok Kunsthalle’s program: mending an abandoned building, strengthening the local community and uniting disparate individuals. The work references the Japanese practice of “kintsugi” or the art of repairing broken pottery with metallic lacquer. The underlying philosophy of “kintsugi” is an embracing of an object’s flaws and history, echoed by the physical situation of the work in a formerly abandoned printing house.

There is a strong similarity between how one recalls a dream, a memory and a film. This overlap is where Korakrit Arunanondchai forms his filmic compositions. Here, there is a possibility for different registers of lived experiences to combine with each other to go beyond themselves. Time is a primary subject and material for Arunanondchai. For him, time is held and experienced through the body, both as an individual and as a collective. 

“nostalgia for unity” marks a turning point in Arunanondchai’s practice, where negative space is the primary medium of the exhibition. The installation is a painting, a film, a stage and a script that activates absences: the absent figure in this work is a Phoenix. The script for the film acts as a threshold between what is permitted and what cannot be addressed, between different timescales and between people and things we cannot see, but want to believe exist. These words are the portal to give life back to the ashes. 

Prayers are incantations, forms activated by intent. That intent is both a historical image as well as a speculative one. Does a prayer activate an event? Or is it the event itself? Perhaps prayer, especially in collectivity, is inherently a break in time because it connects different timescales — the past with the present, and the future with all that has fallen. The Phoenix gathers its ashes along with those that came before it, becomes ablaze and takes the spark of fire from the ground to light up the sky. Inherent to its nature is the promise of renewal, and perhaps a collective transcendence through death itself. A death with a promise of reincarnation. 

Unanswered prayers construct a negative space of potentiality. The failure of those potentials to come into fruition is also the limit where spirituality lies. Arunanondchai’s work is not about possibilities, but rather impossibilities. And it is within these exact impossibilities that he generates images. Renewal is not a seamless process; it reverberates, it splits off. To pray is also to refuse the idea that one can pick their fate consciously. 

In this exhibition, Korakrit Arunanondchai (born 1986 in Bangkok, Thailand) returns to some of his enduring themes: the coincidence of beginning and end, the simultaneity of decay and rebirth, the correspondence between individual enlightenment and shared spirituality. He draws on both the story relations of animism and the spiritual features of a church to create a participatory space where the elements of prayer, intent and event are connected through the bodies of the audience moving through the space.

The work is inspired by the history of the building of Thai Wattanapanich, a printing house that printed school books that were used when he was a student, up until the early 2000s when the building was destroyed in a fire. He sees this architecture as a body of a giant, decomposing in time. At the heart of this body, the artist reconstitutes the ashes from the fire into a mass that resembles a stage. A prayer text protrudes from the floor. The light in the room, slightly tinted through stained glass and haze, resembles the color of the unbreathable air we all know too well from science-fiction and present reality. 

Even though negative space is the medium, that is not to say this installation is without a sense of volume. The sound in the room divides the space into 3 distinct layers, one of the underworld, one from the sky above, and an earthly layer that links the ground to the sky through a performative ritual that was enacted in the space, prior in time. These invisible performers work together to generate heat for the phoenix. Afterwards, their negative presence haunts the space. 

The elements of the installation become parameters set into motion by the artist, a point of departure towards a network of negative spaces. What is not tangible, not realized and not possible becomes both the agents of the installation and the site in which Arunanondchai operates. It is in this exact negative domain where the artist’s spirituality and art manifests itself. At the heart of this void is the Phoenix, the absent protagonist. It promises death, but also rebirth in an eternal cycle of potentiality. Its ashes are both a symbol of what is gone and what is yet to come.

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

Bangkok born, Korakrit Arunanondchai is a visual artist and filmmaker who is currently based in New York and Bangkok. His Recent solo exhibitions include: Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2022), Art Sonje Center, Seoul (2022), Singapore Art Museum, Singapore (2022), Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst (2021), Serralves Museum, Porto (2020), Secession, Vienna (2019). Arunanondchai’s work has been presented at numerous biennials and festivals, with recent presentations at the Thailand Biennale, Chiang Rai(2023), Kathmandu Triennale (2022), Gwangju Biennial (2021), Yokohama Triennial (2020), the Venice Biennale (2019) and the Whitney Biennial (2019)

In early 2018, Arunanondchai co-founded “Ghost”, a time based media festival that happens every 3 years in Bangkok. He curated its inaugural series, Ghost:2561, in 2018, and organized the second edition Ghost:2565 in 2022.

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Michel Auder (born 1944 in Soissons, France) is a filmmaker who has been creating experimental movies and video art since the late 1960s. Auder is a poet of visual observation— his films bear an affinity to literary forms and can best be described as filmic poetry. He is known for his non-linear and non-narrative style, capturing his life and the lives of those around him in an intimate and fragmented manner. 

Auder's work often blurs the lines between art, documentation, and personal narrative, the diaristic and oneiric. Throughout his career, he has produced a significant body of work ranging from fictional narratives to personal documentaries. Auder's early adoption of the portable video camera allowed him to document the everyday phenomena of his own private experiences, with a directness that was revolutionary at the time and that is still radical after many decades. 

In New York he was involved with Andy Warhol's Factory and became a participant-observer of the New York social scene, capturing footage of many of the personalities and events associated with it. This connection led to a video archive of thousands of hours that offers a unique perspective on this period of American art history.

Over the decades, Auder has continued to work consistently exploring the potential of video as a medium. Through his works, Auder builds a connection between the personal and the universal. He allows viewers to see the world through his eyes, sharing experiences that range from banal to extraordinary. Through the intimate use of the filmic medium, Auder questions the nature of time and memory, juxtaposing real and fictional, perception and representation, intimate and exposed. 

The selection of works presented in Bangkok Kunsthalle, unfolds along two interwoven trajectories: five works on Nature and nine works on the evolution of Auder’s oeuvre through different genres.

In the first group of works, Michel Auder often describes his relationship to Nature in terms of time. He explains how the representation of Nature necessitated the invention of a specific editing technique in order to accommodate the nuanced temporality of natural phenomena. In his seminal film ‘Voyage to the Centre of the Phone Lines’, (1993), Michel Auder juxtaposes covert recordings of anonymous mobile-phone conversations with a seascape— sand, water, the sun, the moon, wandering birds, not a human in sight. The images evoke an accepted universality of the timeless natural world, while the audio evokes a sense of mundanity and futility, a Joycean smattering of human drama and banality. People fret obsessively to one another about their personal lives, their frailties, the anxiety in their voices revealing their inchoate sense of mortality. ‘Domaine de la Nature’ (2023) is a collage of natural scenery employing extensive long pans and a slow rhythm. ‘I am So Jealous of Birds II’ (2011) is a ‘video haiku’ of New York City birds. Finally, ‘Flowers of Thailand’ (2023) is a two-screen installation, produced in Bangkok, which evokes an epistolary correspondence between form and colour.

In the second group of works, a selection of chronicles, travelogues, diaries, video portraits, video poems and intimate recollections reveal Michel Auder’s predilection for modes of editing and filming that enable multiple narratives to emerge. ‘Bangkok Yaowarat’ (2023) depicts a daily scene of Bangkok streetlife, a voluntary choreography of people and commodities that are perfectly synchronized. Video portraits of artists such as ‘Cindy Sherman’ (1988), ‘Florence’ (1975) and ‘Alice Neel Painting Margaret’ (1978 ed.2009) constitute extraordinary poetic documentations of the creative process of artists in their studios.

Auder’s videos often take the form of intimate correspondences to impossible interlocutors such as ‘Heads of Town’ (2009). At times, his works take the form of collages, adopting the rhythmic structure of music and poetry such as ‘Van Gogh’ (2023), ‘Gemälde 2’ (2011, ed. 2019) or ‘Bangkok City’ (2023). ‘DAUGHTERS’ (2023) is an installation which is shown for the first time. It combines two videos: ‘Talking Head’ (1976)  an intimate documentation of the artist’s daughter talking to herself, and ‘DAUGHTERS’ (2023) a work which subtly inverts the relationship between foreground and background while the voiceover and words by Natalie Brück assigns a simultaneously menacing and seductive sonic element to it. 

Michel Auder’s work has been shown in numerous exhibitions at galleries and museums internationally, including solo shows and retrospectives in Moma PS1 (New York, USA), documenta 14 (Kassel, Athens), 2014 Whitney Biennial (New York, USA), Frans Hals Museum (Haarlem, The Netherlands), Fondation Vincent Van Gogh (Arles, France), documenta 13 (Kassel, Germany), Museum Ludwig (Cologne, Germany) and Kunsthalle Basel (Basel, Switzerland). His work is represented in public collections internationally, including Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris, France), FRAC Provence-Alpes-Côtes d’Azur (Marseille, France), Kadist Art Foundation (Paris, France) and Muhka (Antwerp, Germany), ICA (Miami, USA) amongst others.

Curator Statement
Recording, Replaying, Recollecting:
A journey through the works of Michel Auder
By Stefano Rabolli Pansera

“Thus let your Streams o’reflow your Springs,
Till Eyes and Tears be the same things:
And each the other’s difference bears;
These weeping Eyes, those seeing Tears.”
Eyes and Tears by Andrew Marvell

Michel Auder sees life. He sees the world, observes the people, stares at the countless events of the everyday. His intense gaze spots details that generally pass unnoticed: the witty expression of a passerby, the texture of the petals of the flowers, the unconscious choreography of metropolitan life, the slow movement of the clouds, the flickering images on a TV screen. 

Fundamentally, Michel Auder is an assiduous visual chronicler who has documented and shared his life and observations through the medium of video. 
“I'm not really keeping a diary, rather I use the diaristic form and the documentary form, but I manipulate them." Auder insists. 
As a matter of fact, the manipulation and examination of these forms engage two of video’s inherent properties: intimacy and time. 

Seeing is the main expression of Auder’s practice. In his oeuvre, seeing is both the act of observing and the act of recording. In this sense, his gaze is oblique and persistent. 

‘Oblique’ in the sense that he turns his attention to the details that are at the very margins of the action, indulging the peripheral aspects often neglected. Such a radical displacement of the focus from the object to the background allows accessing life in a very intimate way, as if the artist is enchanted by the very existence of things: a sort of artistic animism. 

‘Persistent’ because Michel Auder lives with his camera and obsessively records most of the moments of his life, he films and then watches and re-watches the clips, refines his gaze, works on the sequences, edits the reels, crops the frames and manipulates the cuts. As Jonas Mekas, one of Michel’s long-lasting supporters and friends, recalls "When I used to go visit Michel at the Chelsea hotel, around 1970, the video camera was always there, always going, a part of the house, a part of his life, eyes, hands. It still is. A most magnificent love affair– no, not an affair: a life’s obsession."

As the title of one of his early works, ‘Keeping Busy’ (1969) suggests, his art creates a cohesive structure out of a flurry of uncomposed moments, out of the disorder of time, out of all of the things that dissolve when we are busy making plans. 

The intensity of his gaze offers an intimate encounter with what he reveals. There is no distance from what he discloses, but proximity, bordering on physical contact with the subjects that he films.

Michel Auder is an observer of life in its splendour and squalor. In quantum physics, the observation becomes indistinguishable from what is being perceived, as there is no ‘total’ or ‘impartial’ observer. Far from being an impartial observer, Michel Auder is complicit with the life that it represents, he is deeply entangled in its dynamics and in its destiny. 

This is the reason why Auder’s films are inextricably bound up with his own life: he is a rebel, and his gaze is itself a subversive act. 

At once poetic and critical, cruel and confessional, Michel Auder’s casually virtuosic videos have for over five decades disrupted traditional perceptual habits of moviegoers and art audiences alike, subverting notions of filmic narrative and processes. Employing new video formats as they become available (from analogue film to mobile phone), Auder has produced short and feature films, video installations and photography that transgress genres, borrowing from art history, literature, commercial television, and experimental cinema.

Born in Soissons in the north of France in 1944, where he spent his solitary childhood, Auder moved to Paris in the late fifties where he trained as a commercial fashion photographer and began making films in the early 1960s. 

In 1963, he was drafted to the French Army and was sent to Algeria as a combat photographer. A true rebel, Auder spent three months of his conscription in a military jail for refusing his duties.

Upon his return to Paris, Auder found inspiration in the films of Jean Luc Godard and garnered support as a filmmaker from the leftist film collective Zanzibar Group. Thus marked the beginnings of his long running career as a video artist. 

After having purchased a Sony Portapak, the first portable video camera, he discovered a way of filmmaking without scripts and sets, he simply carried his camera around with him, adopting the ethos of ‘the world as my set and people as my actors’.

At the end of the 1960s and for most of the 1970s he lived in Chelsea Hotel in New York City. A chance encounter with Andy Warhol emboldened his own self-taught approach to multimedia art and acquainted him with Warhol’s network of artists, models, actors including Susan Hoffmann, known to him and most others as ‘Viva’, the name that Andy Warhol had given her, and whom Auder married in Las Vegas soon after.

Auder’s early films already contain most of the traits of his mature style: they are fragmented, layered videos that document everyday existence. The films are non-narrative and non-sequential as they are cut between various locations and combine different scenes that appear unrelated. The artist began letting his camera roll on friends, family, strangers, and his environment and soon developed a practice of near-constant filming. 

The resulting thousands of hours of footage—shot on devices ranging from the first portable recorders to mobile phone cameras—include biographical portraits, travelogues, and images shot directly from television screens. 

In his only feature film, ‘Cleopatra’ (1970), filmed on 16mm and 35mm film and extravagantly ambitious in scale, Auder foreshadowed his future decades of making art out of his own lived experience. In fact, the production ended up catastrophically as the producer cut the financial support and a copy of the film, screened at Cannes Film Festival, was withdrawn from public distribution. Michel Auder soon realised that he had to reject the standard structures of production and distribution of the film industry to pursue his own rigorous, personal language based on personal intuition and improvisation.

Since moving to New York and becoming part of the scene which centred on Andy Warhol’s Factory, Auder focused on his life’s obsession: recording life on video. 

He observes life through thousands of hours of video recordings. Each of these observations are saved to a vast bank of images that are – sometimes much later – reviewed and edited into new films. It’s an ongoing and seemingly continuous project that has in recent years been shaped by Auder’s use of his smartphone as an artistic tool. Again, his art and his life are intimately interwoven.

The archive of footage he has amassed, and continues to collect, provides the source material from which he creates the individual works. 

While a few works were formed completely in-camera, most have been edited for years, and sometimes decades, after the original footage was shot. As time passes, certain situations, people, and images are revisited, edited, and released from the archive. His process of recollection is not about retrieval of the past as such, nor it is about refugees of a nostalgic past as much as it is about re-telling the past in new potential narratives.

In doing so, he undermines the processes of memory in the form of creative reappropriation: retrospectively examining events in the past and searching for a visual vocabulary to tell new stories. 

Not only is the gaze oblique and persistent, but even the editing process is deferred and nuanced. In fact, Auder describes a very personal approach to traversing his immense video archive: he watches his own footage as if his gaze is turning towards his own vision. 

He constantly reconfigures his vast archive of visual information. He further elaborates on this process: "I try not to deal with the material as soon as it’s made. It’s only years later that I deal with the material. I store it up. I wait until I can look at it.” Auder continues: “That’s why I keep all my work, not because I think it’s great but because I had some kind of calling to shoot every minute of it. There’s no reason for me to erase it even if it looks bad. Experience has told me that I can look back twenty years later and find something interesting. I was smart enough to understand that things get older, and the meanings change.” 

Such an anachronistic approach to editing provides the artist with the critical distance necessary to edit the footage. Furthermore, it provides the freedom to use the existing recordings for new stories and unexpected narratives. Auder’s method vaguely resembles Freud’s description of ‘afterwardsness’: the retroactive understanding of experiences, impressions, or memory whose traces are altered after the fact because of new experiences. 

This concept becomes a method of editing in Michel Auder’s practice. It allows him to produce new, even unexpected effects and meaning out of the same historic footage. 

He combines recently filmed video and new edits of previously shown material until the concept of linear time evaporates, and the past coexists with the present. 

In his attempt to negotiate between memory and duration, recollection and deferral, the re-presentation of the past is neither nostalgic nor idealised. 

The past is simply recorded footage, a “given reel” available to be edited to generate new stories. Auder explains “The past is now. I have no regret; it is simply the available footage that I can use. There is no difference in time between events. The past is past, and memories are just frames on a reel”.

This strategy of overlapping, simultaneity and the overall alteration of syntax creates the powerful sensation of having time and momentum perceptually altered.

During the 1980s, Auder developed several video works that utilize television by appropriating and then reconfiguring footage shot directly from a domestic television screen. 

In a world dominated by mass-media, life is ceaselessly televised and processed, and can be accessed through the screen. 

Therefore, Michel watches the videos as a source of the life that he recollects.

The works produced in this period demonstrate Auder’s creative and pioneering use of scratch, montage, and experimental sound techniques. Likewise, the focus on broadcasted mass-media extended the artist’s long-running examination of the medium of video and forms of representation.

Being able to control the past may mean being in control of the present self. Yet, Auder’s model privileges the opacity of past, present, and memory. He constantly reminds us of the irremediable breach between experience, recollection and its externalized representation. Experience is always reconstructed in memory, and memories are not pure representations. Considering the filmic strategies and overall style Auder has developed, we can see how he, in fact, highlights the tensions between memory and forgetting, recollection and narration, preservation and erasure. 

This tension becomes even more powerful with Auder’s recent works that respond to the new forms of mass voyeurism as exemplified in the explosive proliferation of reality-based digital media. 

Auder explains his fascination with more recent developments in film as follows: “By the year 2000, we all became filmmakers, mostly for the worse and in some cases for the better. We all have a digital tool, or two, in our pockets. By using these recording devices new authors have emerged, telling stories like never before; Film Novelists, Film Playwrights, Film Poets, Film Essayists, Film Painters, Film Biographers, Film Columnists, Film Reporters, Film Animators, Film Wordsmiths, Film Scribes, Film Sculptors, Film Scribblers...”

With “Endless Column” (2011) Michel started directly using the pictures recorded on his mobile phone and adopted a new method of paratactic editing, with sequences of still images compiled without hierarchy, with no overlapping nor effects. 

These brutally non-mediated and intimate chronicles reveal the contradictions, gaps and paradoxes involved in trying to make film represent real life experience and highlight how the language of moving images suspends us within systems of watching and being watched that are simultaneously intimate and distant, nostalgic and emotionally detached.

Even when confronted with these new modes of seeing and recording, Auder’s gaze focuses on the unexpected gestures, the expressions, the situations and all the unexpected details that fade away while we are busy living our lives. 

He grasps these moments that we often forget to pay attention to, when joy is more ephemeral, and melancholy is more intense. 

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Richard Long (b. 1945, Bristol, UK) 

Long transforms his journeys into works of art. Walking is a process and an artwork at the same time. In 2000 he would say: “My intention was to make a new art which was also a new way of walking: walking as art.”

On his walks, Richard Long might gather natural elements that he transforms into a trace-work of art.

Richard Long invites us to experience art differently: in a spiritual and meditative way. There is a natural power within his work which resembles total harmony or a kind of Buddhism.

Major Exhibitions:
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA
Documenta 5 and 7, Kassel, Germany

Elmgreen & Dragset (b. 1961, Copenhagen, Denmark; b. 1969 Trondheim, Norway)

The Scandinavian duo are known for their installations that examine society through an absurdist lens. In Khao Yai Art Forest, they use the tool of paradox and displacement to cast a new perspective on the notion of nature.

Their special commissioned bar “K-BAR” for Khao Yai Art is dedicated to Martin Kippenberger, a notorious alcoholic German painter who died in 1997 from alcohol-related health complications. The presence of a small functioning bar, which opens only once a month, is an expression of urban luxury and refinement displaced in the the forest.

Major Exhibitions:
Tate Modern, London, UK
Victoria & Albert Museum, London, UK
Fondazione Prada, Milan, Italy

Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook (b. 1957, Trat, Thailand)

Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook is one of Southeast Asia’s most respected
contemporary artists. For over thirty years, her video, installation, and graphic works have been showcased globally.

Born in Trat, Thailand, in 1957, Araya earned fine art degrees from
Silpakorn University in Bangkok and Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig. Her early etchings and aquatints, depicting ghost-like
female figures, introduced enduring themes of death, the body, and women’s experiences. Influenced by her mother’s early death and
societal constraints on women, her work evolved to focus on the
physicality of the body and sculptural installations by the early 1990s.

Major Exhibitions:
The Venice Biennale
Documenta
The Sculpture Center in New York
North Carolina Museum of Art

Francesco Arena (b. 1978, Brindisi, Italy)

Arena is an Italian artist based in Bari, Italy. Arena’s research explores both collective and personal history. In his performances, installations, and sculptures, narratives shape the objects, which range from everyday items like furniture and diaries to traditional materials such as marble, slate, and bronze.

Arena’s sculpture for Khao Yai Art has the word “GOD” carved into two large stones. One stone has the letters “G” and “D,” and the other has “O.” When joined, the word “GOD” becomes invisible, symbolizing its intangible nature. Although not as large as Thai Buddhas, the artwork is heavy and full, preserving the word within it. It exists in its own space and time, installed in the forest.

Major Exhibitions:
55th Venice Biennale
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland
MAXXI National Museum of 21st Century Art, Rome, Italy
Museo Madre, Naples

Richard Nonas (b. 1936, New York, USA)

Nonas is a sculptor and an anthropologist. Richard Nonas’ sculptures
constitute spatial markers to define and constitute a place.

Nonas’ post-minimalist sculptural practice addresses notions of space, place and deep time. He is known for his modular sculptural installations, primarily in stone or wood in exterior and interior settings. His approach to minimalism maintains a sense of self containment and timelessness.

Major Exhibitions:
MoMA, New York
LA Louver Gallery, California, USA
MAXXI National Museum of 21st Century Art, Rome Italy
MASS MoCA, Massachusetts, USA

Louise Bourgeois (b. 1911, Paris, France)

Maman, the most iconic Bourgeois sculpture, represents a spider as the symbol of the maternal figure. It is a cage and a nest at the same time. In Bourgeois’ words, the spider is the animal that constantly repairs the web. Maman, therefore, represents the patience of repairing and the care of healing wounds. 

In the context of Khao Yai Art Forest, Maman alludes to this specific attitude of repairing and healing nature. Like a spider we must weave again our relationship with nature which is our mother and our home.

Major Exhibitions:
Tate Modern, UK
Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain
Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan
Qatar National Convention Center, Doha, Qatar

Fujiko Nakaya (b. 1933, Sapporo, Japan) 

Nakaya is a Japanese artist, a member of Experiments in Art and Technology, and a supporter and practitioner of Japanese video art. Nakaya was born in Sapporo where her father, Ukichiro Nakaya, who is credited with make the first artificial snowflakes, was a professor at Hokkaido University. Nakaya is most widely known for her fog sculptures which represent a new type of land art. Her works are not based on imposing a structure on to nature, but represent making the invisible become visible, poetically melding art and science with nature.

Landscape Design by Atsushi Kitagawara Architects - Angel Estevez
Since the installation at Showa Memorial Park, Kitagawara has been collaborating with Fujiko Nakaya alongside his architectural practice. AKA team, led by Angel Estevez, worked with Fujiko Nakaya to create the Fog Forest landscape in Khao Yai.

Major Exhibitions:
World Fair Expo, Osaka
Grand Palais, Paris, France
Mori Art Museum, Japan
Himeji City Museum of Art
Fondation Beyeler