The eyes like nomadic orbs, wandering the screen and inquiring the floor, like vagabond satellites in stray orbits -- eyeballs in search of their owners, lost or liberated from what once held them transfixed -- are the centrepieces of Apichatpong Weerasethakul's new exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, Paris.
Opening last Tuesday, "Particules De Nuit" ("Night Particles") turns the brutalist Pavilion Brancusi -- an architectural space just outside the escalator-encased Pompidou proper -- into a nocturnal shelter of lights.
The exhibition is a part of the Pompidou's retrospective of the Thai artist put together under the theme "Des Lumières Et Des Ombres" ("Of Lights And Shadows"), consisting of the screenings of all his films, feature and short, a masterclass, a VR show titled A Conversation With The Sun (staged in Chiang Rai earlier in January), and a beautiful book of essays and rarely seen photographs.
This is a full-to-bursting show hosted by a foremost contemporary art centre to recognise the Chiang Mai-based Thai artist, yet another testimony to Apichatpong's status as an artist of the world -- an artist who moves assuredly between gallery space, cinema, text and new digital media. The film screenings run until Nov 9, though visitors in Paris should check out "Particules De Nuit", which runs until Jan 6 next year. The VR installation, I've heard, is already fully-booked until its last day on Oct 14.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul's exhibition at the Pompidou in Paris.
"Particules De Nuit" presents Apichatpong's previous and new video installations. Those who closely follow his gallery oeuvre may be familiar with some of the pieces on show -- Solarium, Haiku, Seeing Circles. But what makes the Pompidou exhibition feel novel and tremble with hypnogogic mystery is the setting: first, the building in which the show is housed, the former studio of the Romanian modernist sculptor Constantin Brancusi, and above all the way the heavy concrete texture of the space is made to feel almost weightless by the shadows of lights, or the lights of shadows, throbbing in the low-key, partitioned rooms. As usual when confronting his work, you allow yourself to float in and out of the experience.
The subject is "seeing" -- or not seeing, or not being able to see (voir/n'est pas voir). These video pieces contemplate, as the text explains, "the simplicity and complexity" of looking, seeing, gazing, or maybe of meditation. Faces, hands, feet, people, nature, bodies, the sunlight glistening on the surface of water, homes, insects on paper, Tilda Swinton, Thai students at street protests -- these are "images" and not "contents" (how I despise that word in its mercenary modern parlance). Apichatpong's works should remind us that symbolism is overrated: what we see is what matters, is what it means.
All these works demand attention and duration, for an image only moves you once you allow it time to gaze back at you. Two pieces moved me, as I'm sure they did others. The first is a series of short videos projected with multiple projectors onto one side of a wall, side by side in a row of miniature screens. The "home movie" digital images have a raw, 16mm quality of Bruce Baillie, the American experimental filmmaker and Apichatpong's hero (there's also a piece here called For Bruce), and they blur the lines between diary, artwork, newsreels and personal contemplation. The other is the orbiting-eye Solarium, which seemed the draw the most attention on the opening day in Paris.
Solarium, with a nod to the pulpy horror film Pee Ta Boh (Ghost With Hollow Eyes), premiered at the Thailand Art Biennale late in 2023. The original setting was in a classroom in an abandoned school in Chiang Saen -- the long drive to that border town by the Mekong was part of the viewing experience. A video of a man whose itinerant eyes have deserted his face was projected onto a transparent screen that functioned also as a see-through wall separating two rooms.
At the Pompidou, the video is slightly re-edited and the site becomes a half-open space with a screen at the centre. The eyes are still travelling through the floor, still gazing out in all directions -- still seeing and not seeing. Apichatpong's intriguing method of investigating the act of seeing while celebrating its inherent poignancy and pleasure has always been evident; the ta -- eye -- motif and the suspicion of what seeing might entail are rooted both in the surrealism as well as in the Thai ghost cheapie he cites as an inspiration.
Eyes without a face also comes to mind. Maybe it's supposed to be that way: the eyes, detached, disengaged, roaming like freed animals, searching for a vision, for light in the darkness.
"Particules De Nuit" is part of the Apichatpong Weerasethakul retrospective "Des Lumières Et Des L'Ombres" at Centre Pompidou in Paris. On show until Jan 6.
