Exhibition · Bangkok Kunsthalle · Bangkok
Archives have long been a locus of artistic engagement. While archival interventions have often focused on the content, Prapat Jiwarangsan is primarily concerned with its materiality as he guides its transitions from the analogue to the digital realm. This exhibition follows media transition as an unbroken, volatile trajectory of the image across four moving image works. The starting points of the works presented in this exhibition are historical archives: negatives recovered from an out-of-business film laboratory; studio portraits from the 1970s and 1980s, in which citizens pose in attire that marks their position within particular social strata; and educational photographic slides of horses, shoes, bodies, artworks and other objects, once used in the teaching of aesthetics at Chiang Mai University. Disobeying archival etiquette, the artist subjects the materials to chemical violations, physical collage, digital distortion and AI-generated loops. In this encounter with the archive, the demand to preserve or the urge to counter is met with an open-ended process of experimentation. The material is invited to fail procedures. The critique happens along the way. If we understand the archive through its constitutive role, then what becomes important are the assumptions through which an archive works: its procedures of selection, categorization and preservation. An archive is an accumulation of material invested in the preservation of continuity. Prapat’s works unsettle the ‘proper’ relations between images, categories, temporalities and meanings. Through repetition, altered speeds, chemical intervention, montage, projection and digital mutation, images are released from the positions assigned to them and set back into circulation. This exhibition widens our imagination of what it might mean, and what it might take, to question not only power, but also the etiquettes geared towards its continuity. Here, queering becomes an operation performed upon order itself, rather…