Taiki Sakpisit, Dark Was the Night, 2024, two-channel 4K video projection, color and black-and-white, sound, 15 minutes 30 seconds.
“In this exhibition, sound functioned as an invisible compass, guiding Sakpisit’s video editing and eliciting moments of suspension and anticipation that further submerged viewers into his video pieces. Alternating between found sounds, dreamlike melodies, and other acoustics, the pace of the scenes also stretched into slow motion: Figures appeared frozen in a painterly stasis, their features rendered opaque as if they were fever-induced phantoms. Dusdi’s longings for her lost family members, especially her faraway son, were conveyed not only through her physical stillness on-screen, but also the ear-gnawing, almost petrifying bass. This pseudo-catatonic ambience and hallucinatory aesthetics bled into Sakpisit’s photographic prints on metallic silver paper that revisit evocative landscapes from his videos: While Wolf in the Breast figuratively equates a fragile wasp’s nest with a safe haven against the once-bloodied walls of Thammasat University, The Moon and The Melodies discovers a cosmic dimension in the unfurling lunar eclipse depicted in the Lop Buri temple’s mural, thus merging human and planetary time lines. In both still and moving images, Sakpisit displays a knack for capturing an ephemeral sound or a pixelated image on the verge of disappearance.”
Read the full article at Artforum.
