Presented by BANGKOK CITYCITY GALLERY

In Songs for Dying, Arunanondchai unites the personal and intimate with the spiritual, the technological, animistic belief systems, politics and the global narrative. The boundary between the living and the dead is permeable in several belief systems, in which the dead are considered dependent on the living in order to attain the healing that makes their eternal rest possible. The video work’s narratives are centered around the artist’s recently deceased grandfather and pop cultural references from The Hunger Games trilogy in the context of the Thai youth movements and student protests in Thailand, while examining the shaman’s ability to heal following the 1948 Jeju massacre in South Korea. In the video work, the shamans sing for the narrator’s frail side, the dying tortoise. Here, the shamans’ song serves as a spirit medium for the artist, as that which makes the journey to another dimension, the sacred, possible.