Alex Kershaw
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2 April - 25 April 2009
Alex Kershaw
The Phi Ta Khon Project
Press Release
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This April GRANTPIRRIE presents new video work by Alex Kershaw produced during an Asialink Artist Residency in Thailand in 2008. In a similar vein to his photographic works, The Phi Ta Khon Project continues Kershaw’s exploration of the psycho-geography of places, the way places are defined by human activity and the way history conditions our responses towards specific locations.
Kershaw’s project centres around the Phi Ta Khon festival in the Thai town of Dansai. Translated as ‘ghosts follow people’, Phi Ta Khon combines animist, Brahmin and Buddhist traditions. Working closely with the local council, the artist spent a few months talking to the locals, researching the festivals spiritual and sociological values, and mapping out the parameters for cultural and artistic interpretation that accompany such experience.
Rather than a formal documentation of the festival, its meaning and its procession, the three-channel video depicts actions, people and rituals – both actual and choreographed – that constitute what is better defined as a relational process between the artist and the location of exchange. It is this mediation of place through interpretation that makes Kershaw’s medium pivotal rather than incidental and peripheral, allowing us to question the role and aesthetic of video itself as the very location of exchange.
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