“I have a question about history”, begins one of the central strands running through Nawin Nuthong’s solo exhibition ‘The Immortals Are Quite Busy These Days’ at Bangkok CityCity Gallery. The show, which ran till March 21st, is Nuthong’s first solo exhibition, explores the entanglements between the game worlds and social, political and historical narratives, and is  developed in collaboration with sociologist Kritti Tantasith. 

 The artist deploys an archeological impulse, drawing from the methodologies of “archeo-gaming”, proposed by sociologist Andrew Reinhard. It is not about gaming, but rather moves through game worlds to engage with the contemporary histories of the region. The exhibition unfolds as a series of encounters with “thresholds”, alluding to the idea of “Threshold Guardians” in game worlds, each one occurring at a point of breakdown in narrative formation, a moment of stuttering, of incommensurability. 

 Walking into the exhibition, one encounters a multi-channel video installation built that alludes to the looped videos of “pause” screens in games: trees and mushrooms grow endlessly, treasure chests pop open, while glowing magical snow falls all around. The space becomes a kind of threshold, where multiple intersecting realities begin to fold into each other. Accompanying this are a series of light boxes that provide the first key to accessing the narratives unfolding in the exhibition. In these, a child asks the Tree Council about the framing of history, receiving an enigmatic, off-hand response, producing an impasse. Nuthong treats this impasse as a generative space, to think through the impasses produced in narrating contested histories. 

 The central space of the exhibition resembles something between an archeological dig site and the secret backroom of game worlds, where all its detritus are stored. World of Warcraft meets the world of the Civilizations series in a roblox universe. Objects - figurines, videos, prints - are organized in three central “stacks”, each corresponding to an archetypical space in game worlds - the Village, the Book Factory, the Dungeon, with recurring images making connections between them. Each of these corresponds to lines of inquiry in the exhibition - around habitation and resource creation; the organization of knowledge; and accumulation, aggregation and hoarding. A table with a collection of cards resembling those from Magic - The Gathering offers a key to various narrative strands in the room. The cards are both index and artefact, referring to elements of Nuthong’s research, as well as personal stories. They provide a constellation of the ideas explored in the show, with a gesture of rendering them open source. One of the cards, for example, looks at the depiction of Siam (the pre-revolutionary name for Thailand) in the game Civilizations V, where King Ram Khamhaeng of the Sukhothai dynasty is depicted. Unable to find a suitable portrait of the king, the game-designers used an image of then-Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawtra, who was deposed in the 2006 coup, as the model for the character in the game, thus inadvertently becoming an artefact of the imagination of power in Thailand. The gesture is repeated and amplified elsewhere in the show, where a monitor showing the online platform Busy Immortal (https://www.busyimmortal.com/) is displayed. Busy Immortal is an open-source archive of resources and a lexicon of the inquiries in the show, constantly being updated by the artist and his collaborators. 

 The stacks, too, tell stories of the negotiation of geopolitics in the game world: a collage of objects in the “Dungeon” stack alludes to the Blitzchung controversy: in 2019, the video game company Blizzard (which developed World of Warcraft) banned a Taiwanese player from its platform following a post-match interview he gave during the Hearthstone Grandmasters during which he voiced support for the pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong. Blizzard, which is partially owned by the Chinese company TenCent, disqualified him and denied him his winnings in order to pacify their Chinese owners and fanbase. Blizzard came under fire internationally for these actions, and was ultimately censured by the US Congress. By highlighting this narrative, Nuthong points to how the various stages on which the contemporary geo-political struggle around China’s increasing influence in the region is playing out, as well as acts of solidarity of the ‘Milk Tea Alliance’ (which the Thai protesters, as well as those in Hong Kong and Taiwan are a part) of countries opposed to Chinese control. 

 Indeed, reading the exhibition in light of the on-going protest movement and political revolution that is currently on-going in Thailand, it is not hard to miss its sharp political position: that at the heart of these movements is the contestation of historical narratives and historical revisionism, and the attempt to wrest power from those forces that have for so long controlled them. Indeed, the movement is one where the line between popular online cultures and IRL protests is often blurred, with the movement’s most popular symbol, the three-finger salute, being adopted from the Hunger Games and the political use of memes as critical tools. Nuthong’s exhibition poetically makes the point that such contestation is never linear, and proposes a toolkit of methods through which such multi-scalar contestations might be enacted.