"THE THAI WORD for spirit possession is ผีเข้า. Translating to "ghost enters," it signifies the active claiming of a body or a space. Yet while some tend to see possession as an inherently violent occurrence, the word เข้า also means "to cooperate," suggesting the host body's willing fusion with its alien occupant. This spiritual double entendre encapsulates the ethos of Ghost 2568-the third and final edition of Ghost, Bangkok 's multi-venue festival of video and performance"
"Artist and filmmaker Montika Kham-on explores the discipline's speculative power through her video Afterlives (all works 2025), which foregrounds her family's treacherous migration from the Isan Mountains to Central Thailand-leaving behind ancestral lands and unrealized dreams-through imagined letters addressed to her grandfather. This sentiment of desertion resonates in the film's setting (it was mostly shot in an abandoned cinema) and in its current installation at Baan Thewes, a once dilapidated wooden house in the Old Town area."
The Thai word ผีเข้า (ghost enters) conveys both aggressive possession and cooperative fusion, framing Ghost 2568's ethos of spectral occupation and transformation. Moving image is central, with Montika Kham-on's Afterlives reimagining her family's migration from the Isan Mountains to Central Thailand through imagined letters and a film shot largely in an abandoned cinema, now installed at Baan Thewes. Moving images stage migrant invisibilities as wandering phantoms within urban interiors. Performance complements video, converting gallery spaces into oneiric theaters; Dan Lie's Patience reconfigures a white-cube into a draped venue that invites nonhuman presences, incorporating funerary chrysanthemums as solemn material markers.
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