21.10.2009
Shift Electronic Arts Festival
Exhibition Hall, Basel, Switzerland

22-25 October

Apchatpong Weerasethakul's Phantoms of Nabua is exhibited as a video installation at Shift 2009.

This short film from Thai director Weerasethakul portrays and profanes apparitions and rituals. In the opening sequence bolts of lightning rent the darkness and strike a vaguely discernible landscape – perhaps as a result of sorcery? The camera zooms out and the lightning is revealed to be a projected image on a makeshift screen set up on a small square under a neon strip light. Young men arrive in the square and play with a burning football. Gravity and playfulness combine in an organic process, even when the ball sets the screen ablaze, with which the lightning apparition disappears. That which produced the apparition now becomes visible instead: the projector and its faintly blinking ray of light. The film references both Thailand's horror film tradition – in which spectres are depicted as clusters of light – and myths about magic and resistance in the town of Nabua, which was once the centre of communist peasant uprisings.

The Exhibition at Shift 09 presents artistic projects that address in various ways the nexus and interface of magic and technology: the ghosts that manifest as flaws in technical equipment and other facets of the spectrum of extrasensory perception; modern-day magic wands, tricks and tricksters; programme codes as incantation and centuries-old rituals in the media age.

Featured artisst include: AIDS-3D; Craig Baldwin; Susan Collins; Bill Domonkos; Christoph Keller; Tatjana Marusic; Ruth Sergel; Harm van den Dorpel; Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Patrick Ward.

Films