A person underwater upside down

Korakrit Arunanondchai & Alex Gvojic, Songs for living, 2021 (filmstill) © Korakrit Arunanondchai Courtesy of the artists and Bangkok CityCity Gallery, Bangkok; Carlos/Ishikawa, London; C L E A R I N G, New York/Brussels; Kukje Gallery, Seoul/Busan. Co-commissioned by Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst and Kunstverein in Hamburg with support from FACT, Liverpool

Korakrit Arunanondchai

From dying to living

17.9 2022 – 9.4 2023

Stockholm

What brings us together and what divides us? The power of gatherings and the value of our closest ties are at the heart of Korakrit Arunanondchai’s work. Experience the exhibition “From dying to living”, combining geopolitical movements and personal experiences of love and loss.

The artist Korakrit Arunanondchai’s interdisciplinary works explore dualities such as life and death, past and present, dream and reality, reflection and rapture, man and machine, individualism and interconnectedness.

In a narrative vein, he fills Moderna Museet with hybridised form of documentary, film, installation, performance, painting and sculpture. Paintings expand into murals, video projections reflect onto water and sweep across the room.

As the author I exist in between the image and the audience, in the air of the room, telling the story. I am never completely inside one world or another. – Korakrit Arunanondchai
A dark room with projections on the wall
Installation view from Korakrit Arunanondchai – From dying to living, 2022 Photo: Åsa Lundén / Moderna Museet
En sittande figur lutar sig mot ett vatten i ett mörkt rum
Installation view from Korakrit Arunanondchai – From dying to living, 2022 Photo: Åsa Lundén / Moderna Museet

Political and personal

Korakrit Arunanondchai’s practice addresses issues of inbetweenness and dissolved identity with regard to generation, gender and nationality. Animism, natural sciences, philosophy and poetry also play an important role in Arunanondchai’s art, where the power of storytelling is at the core, and the boundary between the personal, the spiritual and the geopolitical is blurred.

Arunanondchai also repeatedly sources material and ideas from conflicts in contemporary Thailand and portrays corrupt belief systems and propaganda from the Cold War in South-East Asia. He interweaves these themes with his own life and family history.

Artist Korakrit Arunanondchai
Korakrit Arunanondchai & Alex Gvojic, Installation view from ”Pray” with Korakrit Arunanondchai, 2022 Courtesy Bangkok CityCity Gallery, Bangkok; Carlos/Ishikawa, London; C L E A R I N G, New York/Brussels; Kukje Gallery, Seoul/Busan. Photo: Soopakorn Sirsakul
Korakrit Arunanondchai’s way of everting the individual’s relationship to the world around them, and upturning hierarchies between the personal, the esoteric, and the political, questions humans’ conditions in other contexts. – Lena Essling, curator
Two hands grasping each other
Korakrit Arunanondchai, Songs for dying, 2021 (filmstill) © Korakrit Arunanondchai. Courtesy the artist; Bangkok CityCity Gallery, Bangkok; Carlos/Ishikawa, London; C L E A R I N G, New York/Brussels. Co-commissioned by the 13th Gwangju Biennale, Han Nefkens Foundation and Kunsthall Trondheim

Collaboration and collectivity

Collaborations and collective work processes are essential to Korakrit Arunanondchai’s practice. Frequent collaborators are the filmmaker Alex Gvojic and the performance artist Tosh Basco, aka boychild.

The collaboration and the process of making and unmaking are as important as the finished work itself. – Korakrit Arunanondchai

New work for Moderna Museet

Korakrit Arunanondchai and Alex Gvojic have produced a new work, “From dying to living” (2022), which is also the title of the exhibition. In this work, the artist explores the threshold between the physical world and the spiritual realm.

“From dying to living” is based on two video works, “Songs for dying” and “Songs for living” from 2021, which constitute opposite poles in the exhibition.

Visit our Exhibition Guide to hear Korakrit Arunanondchai talk about the artworks in the exhibition.

A person crouched on a rock
Korakrit Arunanondchai, Songs for dying, 2021 (filmstill) © Korakrit Arunanondchai 2021. Courtesy of the artist; Bangkok CityCity Gallery, Bangkok; Carlos/Ishikawa, London; C L E A R I N G, New York/Brussels; Kukje Gallery, Seoul/Busan. Co-commissioned by the 13th Gwangju Biennale, Han Nefkens Foundation and Kunsthall Trondheim
Two people with wings
Korakrit Arunanondchai & Alex Gvojic, Songs for living, 2021 (filmstill) © Korakrit Arunanondchai. Courtesy of the artists and Bangkok CityCity Gallery, Bangkok; Carlos/Ishikawa, London; C L E A R I N G, New York/Brussels; Kukje Gallery, Seoul/Busan. Co-commissioned by Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst and Kunstverein in Hamburg with support from FACT, Liverpool

Opposites in the exhibition

The video work “Songs for dying” (2021) conflates 2020’s violent popular protests for democratic reform in Thailand with the censored and hushed-up massacre on the island of Jeju in post-war South Korea in 1948.

Central to the work is Korakrit Arunanondchai’s own personal farewell to his grandfather, whose death severs a link to understanding the consequences of the Cold War in this region – and also to the artist’s own family history.

“Songs for living” (2021) is a narrative underpinned by music and words borrowed from the French poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant, the Polish author and Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz, and the French philosopher, mystic and activist Simone Weil.

Here, Korakrit Arunanondchai and the filmmaker Alex Gvojic together raise questions about affinity and reconciliation with something bigger than ourselves.

Demonstration in black and white, with a subtitle saying "we can live in a world we design"
Korakrit Arunanondchai, Songs for dying, 2021 (filmstill) © Korakrit Arunanondchai. Courtesy the artist; Bangkok CityCity Gallery, Bangkok; Carlos/Ishikawa, London; C L E A R I N G, New York/Brussels. Co-commissioned by the 13th Gwangju Biennale, Han Nefkens Foundation and Kunsthall Trondheim
 Photo in blue and white color scales. A person and outstretched hands
Korakrit Arunanondchai, Songs for dying, 2021 (filmstill) © Korakrit Arunanondchai 2021; courtesy the artist; Carlos/Ishikawa, London; Clearing, New York; Bangkok CityCity Gallery, Bangkok

Images

A figure in front of a burned out house
Korakrit Arunanondchai & Alex Gvojic, Songs for living, 2021 (filmstill) © Korakrit Arunanondchai. Courtesy of the artists and Bangkok CityCity Gallery, Bangkok; Carlos/Ishikawa, London; C L E A R I N G, New York/Brussels; Kukje Gallery, Seoul/Busan. Co-commissioned by Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst and Kunstverein in Hamburg with support from FACT, Liverpool
two kids by a fire
Korakrit Arunanondchai & Alex Gvojic, Songs for living, 2021 (filmstill) © Korakrit Arunanondchai. Courtesy of the artists and Bangkok CityCity Gallery, Bangkok; Carlos/Ishikawa, London; C L E A R I N G, New York/Brussels; Kukje Gallery, Seoul/Busan. Co-commissioned by Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst and Kunstverein in Hamburg with support from FACT, Liverpool
 Photo in blue and white color scales. A person and outstretched hands
Korakrit Arunanondchai, Songs for dying, 2021 (filmstill) © Korakrit Arunanondchai 2021; courtesy the artist; Carlos/Ishikawa, London; Clearing, New York; Bangkok CityCity Gallery, Bangkok
Demonstration in black and white, with a subtitle saying "we can live in a world we design"
Korakrit Arunanondchai, Songs for dying, 2021 (filmstill) © Korakrit Arunanondchai. Courtesy the artist; Bangkok CityCity Gallery, Bangkok; Carlos/Ishikawa, London; C L E A R I N G, New York/Brussels. Co-commissioned by the 13th Gwangju Biennale, Han Nefkens Foundation and Kunsthall Trondheim

More about this exhibition