From 2 October 2024 to 2 January 2025, Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul will be the guest of honour at the Festival d’Automne and the Centre Pompidou, featuring a comprehensive retrospective and a new exhibition. The exhibition, which includes around ten video installations, transforms the former solarium of the Centre Pompidou into a nocturnal space inhabited by biographical and architectural reminiscences.
The Night Particles exhibition has been specifically conceived for a unique location – a pavilion originally built to house a reproduction of sculptor Constantin Brancusi’s studio, now emptied due to renovation works at the Centre Pompidou. While the pavilion was designed to welcome sunlight, Weerasethakul has transformed it into a nocturnal space where light emanates solely from the screened images. The centrepiece is the work Solarium, first exhibited in 2024 at the Chiang Rai Biennale. It revolves around a reinterpretation of the plot of a 1981 Thai horror film in which a character has his eyes stolen and then wanders in search of them. The piece offers a renewed approach to the question of blindness and the internal vision that drives much of Weerasethakul’s work. In resonance with his earlier video installation Fiction, Apichatpong Weerasethakul also unveils, in the Atelier Brancusi gardens, accounts of dreams he has recorded in his notebooks for decades.
Image: Solarium, 2023, at Baan Mae Ma School in Chiang Sean, Chiang Rai, Apichatpong Weerasethakul | © Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Kick the Machine Films