History against myth, politics against lived experience, state power against the openness of the future – Korakrit Arunanondchai’s dazzling three-screen video installation No history in a room filled with people with funny names 5 dramatises the sense of living in a pivotal moment, a time of spiritual and maybe even civilisational crisis.
Three screens are positioned on adjacent walls of the gallery. The middle screen opens on a forest full of green laser beams and a gathering of ecstatic, white-clothed, ghostlike figures who, among the foliage, caress these unearthly, dancing beams of light. On the left, a sequence focuses on the artist’s frail, elderly grandparents, his grandmother’s stare vacant with dementia, his grandfather leafing through photographs of them growing older through the years, while the opposite screen is largely dedicated to the image of Arunanondchai’s friend and collaborator, the performance artist boychild; androgynous, bare-breasted, bodypainted, sparkling with glitter and with her mouth glowing from within, she’s the avatar of an unknowable future.
No history’s narrative is about narrative and its opposite – the ordering power of words, or ordering myths, and an opposing, unutterable materiality, found in the tactility of the performers’ bodies in the more science-fictional sequences in the forest and in boychild’s agonistic gestures. “Reality is made up of words / And words make worlds / But worlds fall apart”, whispers the opening voiceover, prophetically, and as the central sequence winds around the news story of the 12 children rescued from the Tham Luang caves in Thailand, the work plays with the ambiguities of how official narrative usurps the intimacy of human bonds; in the huge operation to rescue the trapped children, the military and the state are seen, recast in official propaganda, not as the ruling dictatorship that it is but as benevolent saviours. Caregiving and care-receiving is a recurring motif, ironically manifest in the object of the cuddly-toy bunny rabbit, cuddled by a Thai soldier, the white-clad acolytes and Arunanondchai’s grandmother alike.
No History’s often trancelike atmosphere buzzes with the currency of posthuman ethics and politics; in the darkness of the gallery a green-coloured human head lies in a thicket of foliage, its eyes closed, asleep or dead, green lasers firing from an emitter nestling there, across the gallery ceiling. This figure appears in the central video too, as the narrator muses on how “our story disintegrates”, while the ‘ghosts’ of authority seek to make us “believe in the order of things”, to hold out for a “future narrative that includes us”. What No History is wary of is mythopoeic, human story-making in any form, except, perhaps, when it comes to care, which might be a transcendental expression of togetherness, not only between humans but between humans and everything else. There is something millennial and apocalyptic to this. As the humanness of human history is shown to come to an end, in the failing stories of Arunanondchai’s pointedly gender-binary grandparents, the opposite screen is occupied by the monadic, androgyne boychild, writhing, gesticulating, mouth flickering with digital light that indicates that, whatever she is saying, it isn’t language but utterance of a more primordial, or future, kind.
Korakrit Arunanondchai: No history in a room filled with people with funny names 5 at Carlos/Ishikawa, London, 23 November – 22 December
From the January & February issue of ArtReview
