“The loudest story always silences the other voices around it,” observes an unnamed narrator in Korakrit Arunanondchai’s four-chapter cinematic incantation Songs for Dying (2021). As the camera switches between panoramic views of past Thai kings on a Bangkok government building, footage of protest marches and the prehistoric sanctuary of Göbekeli Tepe, Turkey – the oldest temple ever discovered – the film and its reciprocal counterpart, Songs for Living, draw us in into the splintered, cyclical narrative of life, death, memory and rebirth. In Arunanondchai’s chimerical world-building, everything is a story – including time itself. Ideologies, belief systems and cognitive structures attempting to make sense of materiality are fictions we experience collectively. And, in excavating and retelling these stories, the figure of the artist finds its purpose.
In Thailand, storytelling is inextricably linked with the form of the ritual. “Thai culture is very ritual-heavy, with a strong Buddhist tradition underpinned by animistic beliefs,” the Bangkok-born artist says. Inherently, rituals expand
