People on Sunday - Online Screening
Tulapop Saenjaroen 06 Jun 2020 - 28 Jun 2020Artist: Tulapop Saenjaroen
Title: People on Sunday (2019)
Synopsis: Episodic stories of moving-image-related workers who are employed in the same performance-art-video project about free time.
Running Time: 20:53 Minutes
Language: Thai with English Subtitles
Production Company: Electric Eel Films
Artist's Statement:
“People on Sunday” (2019) is a reinterpretation, a response, and a homage to a 1930 German silent film “Menschen Am Sonntag”; however, this response is executed from a different context, a different country, different era, and different working conditions. The original film was one of the first films that marketed itself as the film that employed amateur-actors/non-actors. It even had a subtitle underneath its title saying “a film without actors”. Its anecdote is that the film was shot only on Sundays in 1929 as these non-professional actors had to work on weekdays. What seizes my attention is the set of the story—simply about their day-off, life in free time. From my point of view, these non-professional actors then performed as they were having pleasure leisure for the camera, having free time while they were actually working. In other words, they worked/acted as not-working/not-acting. This film attempts to provoke the question of representability of free time, of cognitive labor, of contemporary work ethic, and of the paradox between control and freedom via the frame of cinema.
This film had been shown at 100 Tonson Gallery as a part of the exhibition, “PEOPLE ON SUNDAY”, during 19 December 2019 - 26 April 2020. The exhibition featured a video installation, an electronic song, and colouring images by the performers from the film.
People on Sunday (2019) by Tulapop Saenjaroen is now available to view online every weekend from June 6th (12:00AM GMT) through June 28th (11:59PM GMT).
**THE FILM CAN ONLY BE WATCHED IN THAILAND**
For all enquiries, please contact info@100tonsongallery.com or Tel. +662 010 5813
About the artist :
Tulapop Saenjaroen’s (b.1986) interests in artistic practice revolve around cognitive and free labour, production of subjectivity, postcolonial mentality towards advanced technology, the paradoxes intertwining control and freedom, and aesthetics and politics aspects on mental/physical image production. Recent works of his have dealt with the political relation between what is represented in a frame and what is left out—how they associate, create and govern aesthetic or ‘rational’ codes of meaning/feeling, and how they pre-interpret, homogenise, and sanitise our understanding of an image and the subject it represents.
This exhibition is supported by 100 Tonson Foundation
