KORAKRIT ARUNANONDCHAI

or almost three weeks in 2018, 12 young football players and their coach were stuck in Chiang Rai province’s Tham Luang caves due to flash flooding. Their plight caught the attention of international news, as well as onlookers from around the world, including Tesla honcho Elon Musk. Meanwhile, the Thai junta attempted to reframe their image as one of benevolence by sensationalizing their rescue (2018). Presented by Carlos/Ishikawa gallery in an exhibition of the same title, the work relates the notion of genuine care and empathy between people to the state of being possessed. “In the act of letting something take care of you, you also lose a part of yourself and become that something else,” Korakrit writes in his artist statement. His work proposes this metaphorical haunting as a way in which we can commune with suppressed mythologies and unrecorded narratives of the past, carrying forth localized and embodied accounts.