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Apichatpong Weerasethakul is one of the Thai directors who takes his name to the world.
To mark his birthday, seek out Morakot (Emerald), his video installation shot inside an abandoned hotel in Bangkok. The building goes up in the boom years, when the money arrives faster than anyone can spend it and Thailand looks unstoppable. Then 1997 comes, the baht falls apart and the rooms empty. The place stays standing anyway, wallpaper lifting at the seams, mosquito nets still hanging, a lift shaft that goes nowhere.
Apichatpong brings in three actors he works with again and again and asks them to talk. They speak about their dreams, about the towns they grow up in, about love and about losing it. You hear traffic outside. You hear the building settling. Dust drifts across the frame, lit so it hovers like something suspended in water, and the hotel starts filling up again, not with guests but with everything people leave behind. What you're really watching is how a place holds a memory once the people go.
He's the first Thai filmmaker to win the Palme d'Or, taking it in 2010 for Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, a film where a dying man in Isan sits at an outdoor table and his dead wife turns up for dinner. Before that come Blissfully Yours (2002) and Tropical Malady (2004), which wins the Jury Prize at Cannes, then Syndromes and a Century (2006), set largely in the hospitals where his parents work as doctors. In 2021 he makes Memoria with Tilda Swinton, his first English-language feature, filmed in Colombia around a sound only she can hear.
Morakot (Emerald) sits within (In)visible Presence, an exhibition drawn from a collection shaped over three decades and widened by new collaborations. It gathers 81 works by 40 contemporary artists, plenty of them showing in Thailand for the first time. Sound, scent, light and materials you don't expect to find in a gallery do the work here, letting you sense what nobody can actually see.
Runs until August 3 only.