The Mori Art Museum in Tokyo devotes the latest edition of MAM Screen, its programme dedicated to single-channel video art, to Thai filmmaker and artist Jakrawal Nilthamrong. The screenings, held every evening from 6 to 10 pm on the 53rd floor of the Mori Tower in Roppongi Hills, accompany the major exhibition devoted to Mariko Mori. Born in 1977 in Lopburi and now based in Bangkok, where he teaches film at Thammasat University, Nilthamrong works across short films, feature films, documentaries and video installations. His films have screened at the Berlin, Toronto, Rotterdam and Venice festivals, and have won awards including the Tiger Award in Rotterdam for Vanishing Point and the Grand Prize at Tokyo Filmex for Anatomy of Time. His work has also been shown at the Gwangju, Jeju and Bangkok biennales and at the KW Institute in Berlin. At the heart of his practice are the invisible forces that govern human experience. Nilthamrong interweaves Buddhist and ecological concepts with science fiction and surrealist imagery to show how much each person's life depends on the natural environment and social conditions. Contamination, decay and renewal are recurring themes, which the artist also translates into the very material of film: he uses expired film stock and handmade 1960s-style special effects created from organic materials, letting the texture of deterioration emerge and breaking the illusion of cinematic narrative. The programme, curated by Manabu Yahagi, lasts about forty minutes and centres on Rhizome (2022). A man drifts on a makeshift raft above a flooded world, where adapting to the spread of micro-organisms has become essential for survival. The intrusion of the foreign, the film suggests, is less a threat than the very condition of life, for humans and beyond. The screening is completed by two short works on film, Agent of Decay (2025) and Intransit (2013), which confirm how Nilthamrong continues to rethink the material and philosophical possibilities of cinema.
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