Sorawit Songsataya

The penultimate work in the Dunedin Public Art Gallery’s Rear Window Moving Image Programme for 2026 is Sorawit Songsataya’s Mnemosyne (2022).

As the curator of the 2026 programme, the Gallery’s 2025 Ihupukutaka Kairauhī Curatorial Intern, Anya Samarasinghe notes that ‘Mnemosyne evokes the erosion of memory and the ebbing of the natural environment through 3D animation mapping of point cloud. The way the fragments unfold, spill, and tumble across the screen, reassembling into recognisable configurations, highlights the transitory and subjective nature of past remembrances. Notions of memory are often bound to understandings and experiences of place. The artwork draws upon sites connected to the artist’s life. Ōtepoti Dunedin and Chiang Rai, Thailand, are linked to home and family, and re-emerge in Mnemosyne as dynamic compositions of domestic and external spaces.’

Currently living and working in Bangkok, Thailand, Songsataya is one of four nominees for the 2027 Walters Prize, and the recipient of the Creative New Zealand 2027 Berlin Visual Arts Residency where they will spend 12-months on residency at the International Studio Programme at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin. Songsataya spent time living in Ōtepoti Dunedin in 2022 as the Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka University of Otago’s Frances Hodgkins Fellow.

Mnemosyne will be on display in the Rear Window until 18 October 2026. 

Noho ora mai,
Lauren Gutsell
Kairauhī Curator
Dunedin Public Art Gallery
 

[Image: Sorawit Songsataya, Mnemosyne (still), 2022, single-channel colour HD-video with sound. Courtesy of the artist.]