Sarah Sze: Pictures at an Exhibition: Thailand Biennale: The Open World, Chiang Rai, Thailand

“I’ve always been interested in certain times throughout history where our relationship to the way we experience time and space in the world speeds up radically. The invention of the airplane, the invention of the train, you see really interesting work coming out of that time, in film, visual arts, and writing. We are in the middle of an extreme hurricane where we are learning to speak through images at an exponential pace.” –Sarah Sze

In Sze’s latest work, an atmospheric construction of cascading lines spans from floor to ceiling to create a web of image fragments. This mirage-like apparition – mirrors a process of growth in action, like that of a live experiment in a state of formation and flux. Its torn paper is held in suspension and animated by a film of moving images that illuminates its porous core, creating a vast magic lantern.

The evolving sequence of images from the film spills over the sculpture and onto the surrounding architecture, transitioning back and forth between constellations of individual images and grouping of pixels that resolve larger cohesive imagery. A collection of moments; from the personal to the universal, the momentous to the mundane all held in a precarious equilibrium as they form a kind of memory palace.

This generative work questions and challenges the tenuous threshold between the digital and the analog, and the tactile and the imagined. Permeable and intertwined and you're constantly shifting between what you're seeing and what it's becoming.

All images: 

Sarah Sze, Pictures at an Exhibition at The Thailand Biennial, 2023. © Sarah Sze