11.03.2010
Scai the Bathhouse
Kashiwayu-Ato, 6-1-23 Yanaka, Taito-ku, Tokyo 110-0001 Japan

Friday 12 March - Saturday, 17 April
Closed on Mondays, Sundays and Holidays
12-7pm

The core part of Apichatpong Weerasethakul's solo exhibition Native Land at Scai the Bathhouse is an installation of Phantoms of Nabua.

Phantoms of Nabua is one of the works created for the Primitive project. Phantoms of Nabua was produced during time spent in Nabua, a small village in the north of Thailand.

Nabua was once a quiet village, home to farming people with no interest in politics, but it was placed under tight military control from the 1960s to the 1980s for suspicion of hosting communist sympathizers. The farmers of Nabua who resisted this unwarranted imposition were assaulted or slaughtered by the army, and those who survived were driven into the jungle. Now that the Cold War is over, Nabua's tragic past has been forgotten, and even the people who live in the village have no interest in the events of only thirty years before. Nabua has an old legend that tells of a widow ghost who abducts all the men and takes them away to the other world. This legend was apparently part of the inspiration behind Apichatpong's work.

Films