The Ghost War brings together video, print and sound works by Rohini Devasher and Sung Tieu. The ruins of the Ramasun American military base near Udon ani, becomes a potent point of departure for this exhibition. During the war, Ramasun served as the base of many of the United States’ intelligence operation, as well as the PSY-OPS, a wing dedicated to tactics of psychological warfare. One of the PSYOPS’s most fascinating operations was called ‘Operation Wandering Soul’. In traditional Vietnamese belief, if a body is improperly buried, the soul wanders the earth forever. Taking o from this, PSYOPS composed a soundtrack designed to be blasted into the forests which the Viet Cong inhabited, by soldiers with speakers mounted in backpacks; the content of this track consisted of traditional chants, sounds of ghosts, overlaying a conversation between the ‘wandering soul’ of a dead Viet Cong soldier, discouraging his family from joining the resistance against American imperialism.

Responding to this, Sung Tieu presents ‘Song for Unattended Items’, an 11-channel sound installation where she appropriates this form that was used as a weapon against the Vietnamese resistance and recomposes her own paean to these histories of violence. Delving further into these histories, the video work ‘No Gods, No Masters’ uses archival sounds from the original Ghost Tape No. 10, and juxtaposes this with footage from forests where napalm was used during the war, to clear the space for the invading US forces. Tieu then draws us into the intimate space of mourning, where members of her family sit in a circle and chant and perform rituals of remembrance.

Rohini Devasher’s ‘Shivering Sands’ is structured around a journey to a number of Maunsell forts o the southern coast of the UK. Built during Second World War, these forts were meant to act as anti-aircraft defense systems; they now stand in the middle of the sea as almost-forgotten sentinels, their strange forms rising out of the water. She interjects passages from an essay by Laura Raicovich about Walter de Maria’s ‘Lightning Fields’ that she cuts up and rearranges and inserts into the floating video. Devasher’s weaving together of these two histories, both signicant moments of a masculinist reshaping of terrains in the 20th Century, allow us to think about monumentality and the aerlives of forms and the signicance of scale in human action. Devasher de-territorializes landscape, unmooring it and setting in motion. Landscapes, thus, are no longer static, and instead begin to roam. In the accompanying series of prints entitled ‘Field Notes’, the Maunsell forts begin to wander the earth, like AT-AT Walkers from Star Wars. Presented as a series of archival prints, they appear as both artifact and ction, presenting impossible histories and precarious futures.

More information here: https://www.wtfbangkok.com/events/the-ghost-war