Jakrawal Nilthamrong and Kaensan Rattanasomrerk: Spore

Spore, a duo exhibition of Thai artists Jakrawal Nilthamrong and Kaensan Rattanasomrerk, consists of newly produced collaborative films, video installations, and ephemeral biosculptures.

Working with moving image and installation, the artists share an interest in experimenting with cinematic languages and exchanging knowledge. Their artworks often address issues of collective trauma and Thailand’s history in a wider geopolitical context. In the exhibition at the Edith-Russ-Haus for Media Art, their collaborative and individual works revolve around each other, feeding into and reflecting on one another’s thought processes. Nilthamrong and Rattanasomrerk’s new project, Spore, is a research-based, site-specific art project exploring the possibility of a future where mushrooms act as powerful guides.

“We are concerned so heavily on the overground, we are literally missing half the picture,” says Toby Kiers, an evolutionary biologist specialized in underground fungi, organisms whose influence was very important in organizing the exhibition.

In the artists’ words: “The relation between life above and below ground becomes a focal point for us to employ as an artistic tool to investigate and provoke this overlooked connection. Working on the Spore project began as an obsession and an attempt to comprehend this relationship via mycology, and we broadened our mycological interests by expanding on the history of the focus area and its link with people.”

During their residency in Oldenburg, Germany, Nilthamrong and Rattanasomrerk worked on films that follow Thai immigrant workers searching for mushrooms in the forest as a metaphor for spirituality, immigration, transformation, and homesickness. The resulting artworks examine wounds from the past and illustrate these scars’ ongoing existence.

The mushroom can only grow from decay. For the artists, it functions as a metaphor for how humans may reinhabit the space of the wounded, making it the very foundation of human existence. The question the exhibition provokes for them is: How might we interpret exposure as a form of political critique and action, rather than as a manifestation of victimhood?

Spore is a poetic entanglement of organic sculptural matter, filmic experiments, and geopolitical historical investigation, placing site and cultural specificity at its core.

Jakrawal Nilthamrong and Kaensan Rattanasomrerk were the 2024 recipients of the Media Art Grant from the Stiftung Niedersachsen at the Edith-Russ-Haus for Media Art.