HARIT SRIKHAO

BANGKOK CITYCITY GALLERY presents Imago, a solo exhibition by Harit Srikhao running from October 12 to November 30, 2024. It is a confrontation, chrysalis and culmination of his practice in image making. Srikhao looks at the process of maturing as a coming to terms, not as surrendering of oneself to age but rather a synthesis of memories – a conversation to reclaim the image of the self. This presentation marks the artist’s first exhibition with BANGKOK CITYCITY GALLERY.

Sharing the title of the exhibition, Srikhao’s first venture into moving image making, Imago is born of the artist’s process of undergoing therapy. The trauma born of the estrangement with the image of his past, his practice approaches the act of healing and understanding himself not as a eradication of it. Rather, the coming into shape of its excess, finding form to memories good and bad. The film presents a jumbled and disjointed narrative of rediscovering oneself in forms semi-visible. An attempt to have a conversation with himself as well as the image of his past, Srikhao tackles the agency of his own image and his own story. What does it mean when he cannot recognise himself in it? and how does he come to understand the position he is in now against the blurry images of the past.

Not a mere confrontation but an ever evolving process of continuous effort, Harit addresses the core of his image making practice. Seeing himself through not only practices of the past but himself as a person.

Alongside Imago Srikhao will present new photographic works Can a Moth Remember Its Caterpillar Days?, Histogenesis and Window 2024-2014 and moving image Papermache. Setting the stage with the literal materials of his past and documented images in search of days gone by. They take a look at the space as a whole as to what is conducive to a pupae process, a state of vulnerability seeking to shed itself.

Imago Original Soundtrack EP, released and produced alongside the exhibition, features tracks by the long-time collaborator and musician, Tinnawat Chankloi with mixed and mastered by Atsanee Sangkaew. Crafted in conversation with the Srikhao’s latest work, the track reconfigures the narrative of sonic cues prevalent in coming-of-age cinema, with a simple string of melodies hinting at a conclusion that never arrives. Window (Demo Version) will be released as a physical CD, with the full Imago Original Soundtrack EP available online.

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Imago

Harit Srikhao

Text: Pongsakorn Yananissorn

Imago came as an anticipated surprise. I perhaps begin to understand for the first time the intentions of Harit’s practice as a whole. In captured images of boys playing soccer and statuesque forms of bodies, we see that this is him. Yet somehow the threads between them seem hidden somewhere. A flash of nostalgic adolescence long lost comes from time to time, and in a later work an obsession with intricate power relations, they all arrive in different shades of opacity.

The photographic image is potent here, it carries in their medium the ability to understand through visible light. But often, the subjects in which their light is casted upon is conflicted. They bounce from being objects to subjects then back to being objects again once they are viewed. After talking to Harit, it is even more conflicted, the relationship of the lens and the light and the subject is reflected back into himself. They are in a sense all self- portraits. A self-portrait that produces another self, an involuntary act of distancing. This image of the self is divorced from the living and breathing one, it is an excess yet it arrives in all of his other works, as glimpses and shadows. All images are representations, in that they ‘re-present’ an elusive subject that has its context and autonomy left out of the frame. It is to relinquish the subject to the past. Although this newly created image also escapes its creator, it could be used and appropriated, and have a life of its own or become the life of another.

This is all taken as his journey, one that wouldn’t have been possible without working with an art therapist, Natchanat Krasachol. I decided that I couldn’t approach it without her so we had a chat. Through our conversation it happens that the work isn’t a straight product of an artist going through the process and producing work, it is not as simple as the goal is not therapy. Rather Harit went at it with the intention of learning the tools of art therapy, to understand the methods so that he could make them his own. It began as a simple process of drawing oneself, to render visible much like the photographic process, the different dimensions of you. And in this case the ones that you dare not confront in its whole. It came to mean the manifesting forms of the self so you can come to live with it, make it digestible, make it portable, for you to carry forwards. The distancing act of the photograph then can reverse its relationship with him, from a relinquishing of the self from subject to object understood anew as a will of reclaiming them not as his present selves but different bodies that he must bear. Unsightly images of the past are to be embraced not eliminated, it is making tangible the selves we choose to shun. She called it the rearranging of compositions of the self.

It all seemed a daunting task to someone who just heard and talked about it rather than experience it himself, but the overwhelming labour is not lost on anyone. It is the determination of the origin to approach its representation gone astray, a person attempting to talk to his past self. Ceaselessly confronting and transforming scarred images stripped of all its agency into one he could comprehend. There is nothing more honest than when he said that this work is for that boy in the past. It was long overdue. __