Jim Thompson Art Center

The third and final edition of Ghost, a video and performance art series—Ghost 2568: Wish We Were Here, curated by Amal Khalaf— takes place from 15 October – 16 November, 2025, across 8 venues in Bangkok. The curators of the first two editions, Christina Li and Korakrit Arunanondchai, return to “haunt” Ghost:2568 with special projects and Host returns, an alternative pedagogical platform by Pongsakorn Yananissorn.

This edition is conceived as a song for survival within the shrinking spaces of freedom in our cities, a meeting place where longings for each other, for lost places, and erased ways of being can take form and find rest. Tracing the edges of Bangkok’s Chao Phraya river, Ghost:2568 explores the unruly and ungovernable ways we bring new worlds into being, and the messy solidarities we craft in the process.

Unfolding as a gathering of moving image, sound, performance, and community Ghost:2568 has an active programme alongside the exhibition. With performances, round tables and workshops with artists, dancers, musicians, fashion collectives and metaphysical practitioners, Ghost:2568 becomes a space for collective unlearning and experimentation.

Ghost is a methodology as much as a festival—a way of surfacing genealogies and trajectories of “ghost thinking”. Ghost 2568: Wish We Were Here offers a collective space to commune in rebellion and joy, to share heartbreak, and to imagine the fragile futures that ghosts demand we remember into being.

for each other, for lost places and ways of being can take shape and find rest, Ghost:2568 traces the edges of Bangkok’s Chao Phraya river and explores our entanglements with each other, the worlds we want to live in and the messy, unruly and ungovernable ways we bring those worlds about.

Nine Chairs

This installation extends Reading by an Artist into a collective and spatial form. Nine dining chairs, each borrowed from a different family and having witnessed countless domestic moments, are arranged in the pattern of the Later Heaven Bagua (后天八卦) and its Nine Palaces (九宫), guided by the shifting cycles of the San Yuan Xuan Kong Nine Periods system (玄空九运).

Every hour, the chairs are reoriented to align with the most auspicious direction at that moment, channeling the positive energy of the space. Visitors who sit are invited to receive this alignment, to rest in its flow, attune to its rhythm, and open themselves to its potential for renewal and healing.

The central chair remains unseated. It becomes a vessel filled with salt, a material long associated with purification and protection. Each participant is invited to add a handful of salt to this chair before sitting, contributing to the collective act of cleansing and renewal.

These dining chairs carry the traces of family life… conversations, meals, laughter, and arguments, bearing witness to intimate dynamics and personal histories. When positioned within this cosmological framework, they weave together familial memory and the cycles of time and space. The turning of the chairs becomes both a reading of the environment and a ritual of care.

Table of Inquiry

This extension of Reading by an Artist transforms the performance table into a space of intimate encounter, collective reflection, and evolving dialogue. The participant sits with the artist at one corner, preserving the one-to-one reading experience that lies at the heart of the practice.

The remainder of the table is covered with a handwritten canvas, weighted by nine stones, on which questions submitted by prior participants are answered by the artist. Visitors are invited to approach the table, locate their questions, and witness their answers in person. Those who chance upon the installation may also submit questions on the spot, which will be recorded and answered in turn, allowing the work to grow and evolve as a living archive of inquiry.

The canvas and stones form a ritualized surface, grounding personal curiosity, attention, and care in tangible form. As questions accumulate, the table becomes both a portrait of collective reflection and a space for individual encounter, where curiosity, presence, and attentive listening converge.

Courtesy of the artist

These Laticifers Keep Bleeding…

These Laticifers Keep Bleeding… melds together fragments from the larger Rubber Dreams of its Lifetime collaborative project in a three-channel video installation. The material is encountered in its endless guises in Southeast Asia and beyond.

Initiated by Bart Seng Wen Long and Kaisa Saarinen, Rubber Dreams of Its Lifetime explores rubber as commodity fetish and fetish commodity. The project focuses on the Southeast Asian industry as a microcosm of globalised supply chains, connecting with issues and inquiries of global importance. Grounded in extensive field research, it aims to produce a multi-disciplinary body of work, including a documentary-fantasy film titled Heveaphilia. With the intention to subvert mainstream perception of fetishism, the work employs the transformative potential of the fetish to disrupt and expand understanding of the material and its profound influence on social history, pre-modern spirituality, geopolitics and metaphysics.

The project was joined by Bangkok-based artist Komtouch Napattaloong for the field research on rubber production and its entangled histories in Southern Thailand. Spiralling out from this collaboration, In the Land of Lady White Bloodexplores both personal and regional histories of Southern Thailand through essayistic and “post-documentary” cinematic forms. Through the prism of “white blood”—a recurring image tied to latex harvesting, contested land, and regional myths of Lady White Blood—the film traces overlapping legacies of power and violence. These include the fall of the Singora Sultanate, the murky lineage of the Na Phatthalung clan, the development of napalm following the World War II “rubber crisis”, land dispossession and the 1970s anti-communist purges, and the Siamese lords’ expropriation of the Lady White Blood manuscripts.

Extracted from Heveaphilia, four talking-head interviews with rubberists from the SEA region connect their personal relationships with rubber to broader themes of historical materialism, the Malayan Emergency, martial arts physiology, synthetic biology, and the enigmatic nature of the laticifer cell; while fantasmagoric scenes from the film provide a visual backdrop that extends or counterpoints their narrations. These segments collapse with haunted excerpts of Southern Thai myths, revolutionary struggles, familial memories and global warfare from In the Land of Lady White Blood. Through the entangling of these narratives, Laticifers… creates new linkages and resonances that continually expand on each other.

Courtesy of the artists

Chotlung: traversing spirits, redemptive songs

I often return to the question: can spaces marked by rupture and detachment become fertile ground for the reclamation of ancestral wisdom? Can we reinvent ourselves not despite, but through these fractures? Much of my work begins with listening—to voices carried through time in oral canons such as the Mundhum, to fragments of family songs, and to the echoes of migration and forced detachment. These are often layered with contemporary sonic textures and visual documents, forming hybrid archives that confront both loss and continuity.

Over the past year, I have been learning the language of weaving, recalling the women in my family—grandmothers, mothers, and aunts—who wove before me. I’ve come to understand how weaving serves as a language that records the history of the Limbu people, while also forming a vocabulary linked to our grandmother goddess Yuma, whose blessing and memory are often ritually invoked through weaving. An initial iteration of this process, a 32 metre-long textile Sam lingma, is currently being exhibited at the 11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT) in Brisbane.

I’m interested in how traditional forms—such as weaving and chanting—can hold space for contemporary demands, and how their meanings shift when mobilized within sites of protest or ecological devastation. Through the Generator Fund, I hope to develop a new body of work that interweaves archival material, moving images, and textiles, grounded in the contested terrain of Mukkumlung—a historically and spiritually significant site for the Limbu community, currently under threat from a state-backed cable car project. This land, deeply tied to ancestral memory and considered as an origin site of Limbu weaving traditions, has recently become a focal point of protest and resistance. The work I envision will draw from oral histories, documentation of recent demonstrations, and my own evolving practice in traditional weaving. In addition to producing my own textiles, I hope to collaborate with community members engaged in the defense and cultural preservation of Mukkumlung. This project will culminate with a presentation of the works at the upcoming Colomboscope exhibition in 2026.

Co-commissioned by Ghost Foundation, Colomboscope and Experimenter’s generator fund, supported by ArTree Nepal, Kalā Kulo, and Yakthung Cho

A Night We Held Between

The film centers around “Song for The Fighters,” which was found at the sonic archive of the Popular Art Center Palestine. Through the layers of the song, in a labyrinth of sounds and sites, the film conjures history as a permanent present tense, a collective and imaginative act.

The film was shot in ancient sites in Palestine—caves, carved holes, underground passages, and wild valleys—the land becomes our main character. It traverses beyond the first layer of visibility to reveal a vast, hidden world similar to the one we know. Throughout the film, scenes intertwine rituals and narratives of community and resistance into everyday representations of social life in Palestine, thus emphasizing the role of collective rhythmic movement and the potential impact that shared feelings can evoke in creating and sustaining a community.

Produced by the Han Nefkens Foundation, Barcelona with the support of Museu Tàpies, Barcelona; Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai; Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MCAD), Manila; NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore and WIELS, Brussels.