The double-channel video installation For Bruce is Apichatpong’s tribute to his long-time friend, experimental filmmaker Bruce Baillie (1931-2020). Apichatpong filmed the overlapped videos of For Bruce when he was trekking in an Amazon jungle in Peru, recovering from COVID. Peaceful and endless is the subject of the videos: a wooden bridge in an immensely lively natural environment. One sees a variety of animals, and flickering light; hears the tranquil flow of the water beneath the bridge, and the artist’s coughs. Filming a non-place in the jungle that is unaffected by memories and is instead unifying beings on a spiritual dimension, Apichatpong offers the artwork as a portrait of Baillie, an artist who embraced film in a primitive way, as alchemy. For Bruce is also linked to another new video installation Seeing Circles, in which Apichatpong means to practise a way of looking that entails no time or memory, “but just to look with our conditioning, simply to be, with camera as a medium.”
