In the video installation Unity for Nostalgia (2025), Korakrit Arunanondchai reconceptualizes ghosts as metaphors for repressed socio-historical narratives, transforming the Asian horror genre into a tool for reflecting on cultural identity, postcolonial tensions, and the desire for connection. The artist, who portrays himself, travels to Thailand seeking communion with his culture of origin, embodied as a ghost—a spectral entity that concentrates cultural memory and symbolic power, traversing boundaries between body and immateriality, performer and audience, ritual and artwork.
Filmed in an abandoned cinema in the city of Lopburi, inhabited by colonies of monkeys venerated as spiritual ancestors, the work evokes these presences as protagonists. In this setting, the ghost emerges as an allegory for silenced histories, colonial imprints, and culture itself as a force that requires bodies to persist. Heat operates as a metaphor for the spirit, while cinematic and thermal cameras—traditionally used to capture specters—are combined to heighten the sense of awe. In one scene, a statue of the artist made of bread is devoured by the monkeys, reiterating the dissolution of boundaries between matter, ritual, and myth.
The installation occupies a closed room, structured around two sets of bleachers: one for the audience and another filled with stuffed toys, suggesting absent spectators and creating a duplicated, spectral audience. Between them, a translucent screen functions as a threshold between worlds. At different moments, it projects fragmented narratives of dreams, rituals, and post-apocalyptic landscapes, until dissolving into darkness, activating beams of light that tint the space like a polluted atmosphere, dense fog from smoke machines, and low sounds layered with voices in prayer reverberating through the visitor’s body.
Between local mythologies and pop references, notable elements include the phoenix, symbolizing death and rebirth, and the mythical five-eyed, four-eared monkey, a creature that devours glowing embers and excretes gold. These elements engage with recent political memories in Thailand, evoking both promises of collective renewal and specters of nationalism and power struggles.
As visitors traverse this immersive space, they participate in a ritual where cinema, installation, and performance merge. Unity for Nostalgia constructs a landscape of awe and hope, in which possibilities for reconstructing collective futures yet to be imagined emerge from the ruins.