Som Supaparinya: Melted Stars

Melted Stars is the first solo exhibition in Berlin by Som Supaparinya, a fellow of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program in 2021/22. In an audiovisual long-term research project that began in 2016, the artist—who is originally from northern Thailand—addresses Thailand’s problematic entanglement with Japan during World War II, as well as the deliberate repression of this history within the national culture of remembrance.

The new video installation Melted Stars traces back what happened on the route from North Thailand via Myanmar to northeastern India, which served as strategic terrain for Japan’s military expansion during the war. Drawing on stories told by older residents of Chiang Mai from Supaparinya’s own video archive, and informed by historical sources, the artist reconstructs the path taken by the Japanese army towards Burma (now Myanmar) and what was then Nagaland and Manipur (now states of India).

Through documentary observations, field research, interviews with contemporary witnesses and archival research, Supaparinya examines the usage of infrastructures and landscapes. At the same time, she makes processes of memory, their transmission, and the conditions and forms of remembrance itself visible.

The exhibition’s title, Melted Stars, alludes to the melting down of found military insignia, through which Supaparinya expresses her protest.

Accompanying the exhibition is a free leaflet, modeled after historical maps, featuring a text by historian Kevin Chua that contextualizes the complex history and the artist’s personal insights into the creation of the new work.

Som Supaparinya lives and works in Chiang Mai, Thailand. She studied fine arts at Chiang Mai University and media art at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig, Germany. In 2020/21, she spent a year in Berlin as a fine arts fellow of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program. Supaparinya is the recipient of the Han Nefkens Foundation’s 2024 grant for video art productions in Southeast Asia.

Curator: Natalie Keppler / Production Manager: Raisa Galofre.