Shen Xin + Guest: Tulapop Saenjaroen

Shen Xin 

Shen Xin makes films and moving-image installations that explore alternative histories and identities. The work layers recorded staged performance, documentary footage, found archival material, and narration that ranges in tone from poetic to political. The artist considers individual stories as starting points for addressing wider issues, making parallels between the power dynamics of personal relationships and those built into the structures of society.

Warm Spell (2018) fuses fiction and fact around the circumstances of everyday life on the island of Ko Yao Yai in Thailand, known for its paradisical natural features. The film navigates the contrasting, often clashing realities of the local traditional farming communities and the leisure needs and demands from visitors, set amidst shifting tides and temperatures of environmental change caused by global warming. Dreamlike atmospheres and different sonic textures – from overlapping voices to electronic sounds – elicit ghostly sensorial experiences and reflections on themes of the body. The piece crashes and reverberates through modalities of abstraction and absence according to the power dynamics of a racially segregated distribution of labour, which prevails in tourism-dependent Thailand.

Warm Spell was co-commissioned by Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art and Salford University Art Collection. Support to the artist was provided by The Elephant Trust and the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten.

Shen Xin (b. 1990, China) practices on Miní Sóta Makhóčhe, the land of the Dakhóta Oyáte, as well as in London. They graduated from the LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore and the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. Their solo shows include the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (upcoming) and Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, England. Their work was also presented at the Gwangju Biennale, New Museum Triennial, M+ Pavilion, Hong Kong, and Ullens Center for Contemporary Art. They held the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten residency and received the BALTIC Artists’ Award.

Produced by SIRIUS.

Tulapop Saenjaroen

Tulapop Saenjaroen makes films, performances and installations in response to themes of capitalism – property, work-leisure dynamics, tourism, self-care, migration and free labour. His storytelling style draws from cinematic traditions, but he pressures the notion of ‘reality’ by fictionalising his account of a given subject. He explores questions of subjectivity in the neoliberal condition, including the paradox of control versus freedom in an everyday life that is highly regulated to facilitate a mindset geared towards production. 

Notes from the Periphery (2021) witnesses the convergence of global economic networks, territories and realms of trade and labour in the port city of Laem Chabang in Chonburi province, Thailand. Situated in the intertidal periphery between life and death, safety and danger, the work depicts an in-between space connecting container ships to the life cycle of barnacles. As barnacles attach themselves to human-made constructions such as ships, Saenjaroen demonstrates, the process is not only material, but also points to a more abstract vocabulary of attachment via kinship, relationship and ownership. The indeterminate overlapping of images in the film mirrors the water washing across the barnacles, offering new perspectives on how connections may emerge across multiple ecologies.
 
Notes from the Periphery was commissioned by Abandon Normal Devices.
 
Tulapop Saenjaroen (b. 1986, Thailand) practices in Bangkok, Thailand. He graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, and California Institute of the Arts. His work has been presented in events and institutions such as the Locarno Film Festival; International Film Festival Rotterdam; Images Festival, Toronto; Image Forum Festival, Tokyo; AND Festival, Manchester; Vancouver International Film Festival; Seoul International New Media Festival; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museum of the Moving Image, New York; and Harvard Film Archive.
 
Produced by SIRIUS.