In her 2023 book Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock, Jenny Odell writes that “at its most useful…leisure time is an interim means of questioning the bounds of the work that surrounds it.” The passage is evocative not only for the way in which it delineates the ever contracting parameters of free time, but also for the ways the language of temporarily is reoriented to the spatial. It feels like an apt point of entry for the work of Thai artist Tulapop Saenjaroen, whose increasingly ambitious video works over the past decade have attempted to engaged with these very questions.
Few contemporary artists feel as attuned to late capitalism—and its insidious means of extracting both our time and resources—as Saenjaroen, whose works offer means of escape from or refutation of these forces. However, the slippery relationship between labour and leisure is only one of several established binaries he troubles, among them visitor and local; narrator and audience; wakefulness and sleep; and stillness and movement. With a background that, appropriately, bridges moving image and performance, and work that circulates in both festivals and gallery-based exhibitions, Saenjaroen is refreshingly nimble in his genre-bending approach, which embraces as easily as it discards elements drawn from documentary, narrative, video art, and more.
Formally, the creative use of voiceover remains one of the artist’s most compelling and provocative cinematic devices, and across his videos it is regularly deployed in intricate and exploratory forms. While at times invoking the language of a traditional omniscient narrator, it is regularly subverted or placed in dialogue
