This is a site specific project Apichatpong created in response to the collection and space of the National Palace Museum in Taiwan, as part of the exhibition “Discovering the Other” (2007). He explored the spiritual elements of the art institution, which is filled with ancient objects and artifacts that run through centuries, and showed the audience how restricted spaces could be extended through images. The artist wrote, “We are in the age of extinction. The cultures, the languages, the forests, the animals, the treasures hidden in the vast tunnels inside the mountains. We are then forced to move to the Age of Enlightenment when nothing is meaningful. But the spirits remain, the spirits of artifacts. At this particular spaceship, outside there used to be two dogs. And it used to be something called the rain. The dogs were always under the spaceship’s canopies and wings, sheltering themselves from the falling water. Now when the sky was empty because there was no sky, their spirits roamed the ship. They immersed themselves in the memories they hadn’t experienced, until they got bored.”
This work has been showed at the International Film Installations “Discovering the Other” at the National Palace Museum (Taipei, 2007) and his internationally traveling exhibition “The Serenity of Madness” since 2016.
Detail pictures:
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