Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, University of California (BAM/PFA) presents Apichatpong Weerasethakul / MATRIX 247 on February 15–April 21, 2013.
MATRIX 247 presents artist and filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s 2007 installation Morakot (Emerald), a single-channel video shot in an abandoned Bangkok hotel. Best known for his award-winning feature-length films, Weerasethakul uses the spatial qualities of the gallery to create a transformative environment, breathing life back into the abandoned hotel.
In the 1980s, the Morakot Hotel served as a haven for Cambodian refugees fleeing the Vietnamese invasion. After the Thai economy collapsed in the late 1990s, the building was vacated and has stood empty ever since. Weerasethakul’s camera slowly moves through the Morakot’s abandoned corridors and rooms, capturing the natural light as it streams through the windows and illuminates the drifting dust, progressively adding more digitized particles to create a mesmerizing constellation. Three ghostly Thai voices speak of faraway places where lovers await their return—places punctuated by violence, but also by the croaking of frogs and the strains of country music. A low-hanging green lamp casts an ethereal glow over the gallery, but the moving images onscreen exist in a more fantastical absent world, a dreamscape for wandering in and out of consciousness.
BAM/PFA
Woo Hon Fai Hall
2625 Durant Ave. #2250
Berkeley, CA 94720-2250
T 510 642 0808
www.bampfa.berkeley.edu