Korakrit Arunanondchai

Korakrit Arunanondchai
September 13 – November 10, 2019

Press conference: Thursday, September 12, 2019, 10 a.m.
Opening: Thursday, September 12, 2019, 7 p.m.

The artist and filmmaker Korakrit Arunanondchai works on one large body of work that focuses on theidea of a “living archive.” His on-going video serieswith history in a room filled with people with funnynames (2012—) features a fictional denim painter as its recurring central character alongside the artist’s long-time collaborators and family members – most notably his grandparents. The protagonists performin a variety of surroundings and situations that reflect upon the natural environment in the Anthropocene,technological evolution, politics, traditional beliefs and culture in transition. His multidisciplinary practice encompasses film, performance, painting, and sculpture, which he frequently combines to form lush,immersive installations. He is interested in relationships that pass through time and mutate with bodies of people, something that parallels the development of recorded history but sidesteps its linearity and singlepoint of perspective in storytelling. Recently, he has used the method of overlaying the structuralrelationships that form animistic beliefs with those of the global information network. The story of thenear future becomes a version of a narrative from a far imagined past, and the dichotomy betweenspirituality and technology increasingly seems to fall apart into a spectrum of greyness that produces a multiple “shared present.”

While Korakrit Arunanondchai turns Secession’s Grafisches Kabinett into a black box to present the threevideos 2556 (2013),Painting with history in a room filled with people with funny names 3 (2015), andwithhistory in a room filled with people with funny names 4 (2017), he uses the staircase leading up to thescreening room for a floral wallpaper, using wild flowers and weeds collected in Vienna as an ode to thegolden dome on the top of the Secession building. Hung above the floral wallpaper is a series of newpaintings, each referencing a still from one of Arunanondchai's videos.

Korakrit Arunanondchai, born in 1986 in Bangkok (Thailand), lives and works in New York and Bangkok.