SAO PAULO.- As a special project, Galeria Jaqueline Martins and Carlos/Ishikawa are collaborating on two gallery shares – the first took place in London this past August, and now they opened the second in São Paulo. Carlos/Ishikawa’s presentation features a video installation by Korakrit Arunanondchai: with history in a room filled with people with funny names 4.

A visual artist, filmmaker, and storyteller, Arunanondchai (b. Bangkok, 1986) employs his versatile practice to tell stories embedded in cultural transplantation and hybridity. His body of work merges fiction with poetry and offers synesthetic experiences engaged in a multitude of subjects primarily based on lives of family, friends, and colleagues as much as local myths.

with history in a room filled with people with funny names 4 merges documentary footage and authorial speculation, as the artist deals with the growing contradiction between the subjectivity required to contextualize the images that make up our memories, and the rationality of the technology we create to store them up.

“Will you find beauty in this sea of data?” Arunanondchai asks, in Thai, in the video, “we left it behind just for you.” In keeping with the previous three videos in his series “Painting with history in a room filled with people with funny names,” the artist engages a hypnotic epistolary exchange with the drone spirit Chantri … [The work] centers on the urge to recreate, relive, revisit to find intimacy with that which evades and, in so doing, holds power over us. We’ve seen this impulse in Arunanondchai’s past works: His body, or that of his twin, is pressed against images in an attempt to mark or affect them the way they mark or affect the body. He attempts to forge a non-unidirectional engagement with the spectacle. But here, in a fractured cinematic space of speculation and documentary, the artist faces down the mercurial force of memory… What happens to memories when they are sloughed off into machines, he seems to ask. Might they recombine to form new paradigmatic presents based on some alienated version of our past? Will they forget us, and can they survive us? - Annie Godfrey Larmon, Clearing, New York, 2017

Korakrit Arunanondchai’s work is currently on view at the 58th Venice Biennale, and the 2019 Whitney Biennial in New York; this Autumn, his work will be on view at the Istanbul Biennial, as well as the Singapore Biennial; and this winter, two back-to-back solo institutional exhibitions at Secession, Vienna, and the Hamburger Banhoff, Berlin will also be staged.