Trouble in Paradise is marked for 2017, created at a time around the death of the monarch of Thailand. The turmoil and engagements that followed stirred many transformations that are captured critically in this video. The work of Taiki Sakpisit has a strong structuralist frame built around a specifically Thai syntax of narrating experiences. There is a covert lilt enmeshed in sounds and spiritual consonance that create an atmospheric motion picture. The story conveyed is not logical but one that corresponds to specific emotions, resistance, courage and transcendence. Video works can be regarded as often beyond the realm of the emotive, for they create atmospheres in which we can emote ourselves or create experiences. However, Trouble in Paradise, like several of Taiki’s works offer powerful renderings that configure the Thai mindset, landscape and its imagination only by grazing the surface of all those things we recognise and find familiar, including and not limited to the supernatural and the faith in Buddhism and its philosophies.

This video is a documentation of specific cultural, political and social episodes that together, cogently construct Thai experiences knit into the stories of Southeast Asia, past and present. It reflects strongly, how we can begin to evaluate and also continue to make art, from these challenging and profound quarries of time, of identities and of truths.