Galerie Micki Meng presents Breath in, Breath out by artist and filmmaker Visra Vichit Vadakan. Inflected by Vichit Vadakan’s hybrid documentary practice, which tugs at the distinction between fact and fiction, this new body of work considers the accumulations of memory across time and material. Films such as Karaoke Girl (2012) and rise (2009) interweave narrative and interview sequences, creating parallel realities. The artist extends this sensitive, gently speculative gaze to her daily life in the form of a multimedia installation containing moving image, wax transfer prints, and sound.
A shoe rack populated with Vichit Vadakan’s children’s shoes invites visitors to remove their own shoes upon entering the gallery space. It is a request for respect, as well as a gesture of welcome and familiarity. A compilation of home videos, the installation’s central work, rests inside a windowlike frame. The tiled screen creates a mosaic of Vichit Vadakan’s home videos: emergent quotidian documents of family, creative practice, spirituality, and the natural world. The videos constitute a personal archive, a time capsule. These small vignettes locate a quiet significance in lingering moments of light, water, breath, touch, small knowing glances—we are called back to our senses, into a consciousness of our place among the inhabitants of this world.
A shared practice of Vipassana meditation and Thai Buddhism weaves through the installation—audio of Vichit Vadakan’s daughter leading a guided meditation plays intermittently in the space, while three prints depict household Buddha figures. The prints, imperfect documents, resemble the blur of memory. The distance of time is contained in the faintest distortion of a window’s glass, or the translucent impression of wax upon a canvas’s grain.
Breath in, Breath out is an invitation to share in awareness of ourselves, of the ways we move through the world and the world moves through us. Vichit Vadakan both clings to and relinquishes the past, positioning it as an artifact of hope and living memory for those who will view it in retrospect, like glancing a rearview mirror.