Night Particles

The Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul is guest at the Festival d'Automne and Centre Pompidou. His exhibition, featuring around ten video installations, transforms the former solarium into a nocturnal space inhabited by biographical and architectural reminiscences.

Now emptied of its works, Apichatpong Weerasethakul's first artistic gesture is to conjure up night-time in the Atelier Brancusi. This condition is certainly a pre-requisite for the presentation of video installations, but is also a means for shaping the experience of a visit which hovers between wakefulness and sleep. The works chosen by the artist result from a daily and diary-based practice which he assimilates into a sculptural process. From within this place where forms once rose up amidst the plunging rays of a zenithal light, reminiscences of past architectural forms are also preserved. The centrepiece of the exhibition is Solarium, a work first exhibited in 2024 at the Chiang Rai Biennale. It revolves around the reinterpretation of the plot of a 1981 Thai horror film in which a character has his eyes stolen and then wanders around in search of them. It brings a renewed approach to the question of blindness and the internal vision that is a driving force in his work. In resonance with his work Fiction, Apichatpong Weerasethakul also unfurls, in the Atelier Brancusi gardens, accounts of some of the dreams he has kept in his notebooks for decades.

Installation views