Original title: Shooting Stars
Thai Title: ดาวตก
German title: Sternschnuppe
Synopsis
Shooting Stars is a reflection on the nature of media, capable of transforming reality into something different, or even into its own opposite. The media can tell a lie. As was made clear by the massacre in Bangkok in May 2010, those who are in power can control and manipulate images/sounds of reality to be what they want to hear, to watch, and to read. They can easily close down any other media that does not support their version. In Shooting Stars, moving images of dark street-light scenery along a railway from Chiang Mai to Bangkok could be seen either as shooting stars or a ray of death. It depends on how one experiences it.
This footage was shot while I was travelling on a train to Bangkok a few weeks after the military crackdown there. While I was travelling, the symbolism of travelling from provinces to Bangkok, late nights, and moving rays of light haunted me. It referred me to protesters who traveled from small provinces to Bangkok to join the protesting. They were shot when it was dark late at night while they were about to sleep on a street. And the rapid-moving streetlight scenery linked me to the rays of laser that led the direction of the gun barrel and the destiny of the deaths.
To distort the frightened images by turning them vertically, sweep such emotion away. It could be images of shooting stars on a peaceful night. Similarly, the sound of bullet shells falling after a shooting (without the sound of the shooting itself) can create peaceful and serene emotions instead of the real fear or panic that shooting actually elicits.
Shooting Stars comments on encounters and situations that I rendered into artistic metaphors. Media can easily function as a distortion and present incomplete information about what is actually being seen.
Som Supaparinya
Reviews
“a video of bullet cases falling in the dark, radiating light. Off-screen the sharp, clear sound of the cases clattering to the floor, like metallic raindrops… The work expresses the feeling of lack of control in the enveloping blackness out the train window between her home city, Chiang Mai and Bangkok. Bullets in the darkness.”
“Everything is not alright” at The Big Idea by a New Zealander art critic—Mark Amery.
Read the full article:
Mark Amery, “ Everything is not alright”, The Big Idea (digital news), 27 November 2015 (download PDF)
“The artist’s solitary cross-country journey echoes the ones made shortly before by hundreds of thousands of anonymous women and men propelled by the desire for change. The wordlessness of the video replaces the hysterical pitch of the dominant media’s demonisation of bodies murdered and flesh torn. Its capturing of light’s ephemeral yet inextinguishable nascence is a fitting tribute to the solidarity of spirit and the desiring bodies of those who had gone before.”
May Adadol Ingawanij for Out Of Frame Film Festival
“Countless glimmering lights stream down the screen, accompanied from time to time by echoing metallic sounds. When viewers learn that this beautiful, enchanting work was inspired by the repeated clashes between protesters and the military in Thailand in 2010, the impression they receive will surely be an entirely different one. In Shooting Stars, Sutthirat Supaparinya demonstrates the characteristic of the medium of film, or how it can transform reality into something entirely different. When we are faced with a beautiful film that is dissociated from reality, we are led to ask ourselves what we truly ought to believe.”
Video Art Screening Programs: A Window to The World [The 28th Program] at Hiroshima MOCA, Japan
Still from video
“In Shooting Stars, a point of light flickers on and off while slowly descending like a meteoric swarm.”
“By rendering the scenes shot from the train window abstract by turning them vertically, Supaparinya is seeing to pose questions about the information and reality all around us.”
T.H.
(From a catalog, How Physical; Yebisu International Festival Art & Alternative Visions, Tokyo, 2012)
- Curatorial Team & Rui A. Q. (Eds.). (2016). 4th Collectors’ Contemporary Collaboration: Intimate Curiosity – Invitation to Japanese Collectors of Contemporary Art. Hong Kong: Hong Kong Arts Centre. [PDF]
- Michael Famighetti, How Physical – Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, FRIEZE magazine Issue 147 May 2012. (PDF)
- Suwa, N. et al. (2018) In K. Okamura et al. (Eds.), Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Vision- How Physical 2012. Tokyo, Japan: Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. [PDF]
- Karen Demavivas, NYFA Featured Artist, 2011, New York Foundation for the Arts. (digital news)
