The artist and filmmaker Korakrit Arunanondchai works on one large body of work that focuses on the idea of a “living archive.” He is interested in relationships that pass through time and mutate with bodies of people, something that parallels the development of recorded history but sidesteps its linearity and single point of perspective in storytelling. As its recurring central character, his ongoing video series together with history in a room filled with people with funny names (2012—) features a fictional painter who paints on denim using it as a connecting fabric amongst different worlds and contexts. Being a material that originated in the west, and earned itself the significance of a working class fabric, denim itself, then traveling to the rest of the world thanks to globalization, bares parallel trajectory to what raw canvas is for Western Abstract painting. Denim is used as a foundation, both as ground for pictures that result from performative body painting actions and as an underlying narrative in the videos whose protagonists are dressed in this cloth. These are, alongside long-time collaborators and friends, the artist’s family members – most notably his grandparents.
