The Haunting Secrets of Others
The original text was made in the form of a publication with Norito Gallery. The Haunting Secrets of Others served as a response to exhibition The Portrait of Siamese Family showcasing works by Prapat Jiwarangsan. Furhter, I had the chance to discuss with Prof Rachel Harrison around the exhibition.
The Portrait of Siamese Family by Prapat Jiwarangsan showcases images that have been manipulated through collage and darkroom processing. The artist engages with two distinct collections of visual archives. On the one hand, there are photographs of the Thai Student Alumni Association from 1890 to 1950, showing group portraits of Thai elites in London. On the other hand, the artist collected abandoned negative films that are portraits of Thai citizens from the 1950s to the 1990s. Jiwarangsan utilises the contrast of social classes, temporal spaces, and complicated historical hierarchical contexts.
Photography has long been seen as kindred to psychoanalysis. Moreover, photography—especially in the form of the archive—presents narratives that remain incomplete. In a sense, as Arlette Farge writes in The Allure of the Archives, "you feel immersed in something vast, oceanic. This analogy to the ocean can be found in the archive itself.1" Farge invites us to dive into an ocean of memories—a vast, almost tangible expanse of recollections. Yet within this overwhelming sea lie gaps and silences that demand our attention.
The mnemonic,
the mystic,
the infinite.
Viewers are often left with many unanswered questions—the images create a deliberate blank space, inviting each observer to fill it with personal meaning. The works are not complete. The negative space leaves room not only for the imagination of the audience but also for the return of the dead. In response, French psychoanalyst Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok coined the term phantom to describe the uncanniness that the living feels. It is not the dead that haunt us, but the gaps or silences left within the living by the secrets of others2.
If history passes down secrets through its phantoms, we are compelled to ask: who and what continues to haunt the present? Jacques Derrida reminds us that the spectre is not simply what remains of the past, but what insists in the now, refusing closure. History carries weight. Phantoms transmit secrets across generations, bringing with them a richness that begs interpretation. There is nothing hidden in them as secrets; they simply reveal secrets as they are.3
The group photos shown in the project refuse to tell us exactly who the protagonists are. Instead, the groups collectively form the shape of the Thai Throne, as seen in Throne no.5 (2020). The disfigured details—which leave most of the portraits untraceable to their exact origins—leave the audience haunted by an enigma.
Who are the others in these images? Jiwarangsan’s works evoke a persistent sense of haunting. The hauntology lies in the eternal in-between of unresolved pasts and uncertain futures, connected by numerous links that juxtapose lives once lived.
A duality of time is at play in Jiwarangsan's works. The first layer of time lies in the history of power—power that shows itself in the metaphorical and semiotic display of the Thai Throne, or its link to Mount Meru4. The second layer of time connects to the negative films of Thai citizens that Jiwarangsan collected. One is reminded of A Worker Reads History by Bertolt Brecht5, where it goes, "Who built the seven gates of Thebes? The books are filled with names of kings. ... So many particulars. So many questions."
These two temporal layers—one rooted in the grand narratives of power, the other in the intimate fragments of everyday life—do more than simply coexist in Jiwarangsan’s works; they converge to reveal a deeper rupture in the flow of time. This convergence disrupts our traditional sense of a continuous, self-sufficient present, echoing the notion that the time is out of joint. Just as the clock that stops for the eternal afternoon tea in Alice in Wonderland, or the dead ancestors lingering in the Ego of ours, the idea of living in the present is neither as self-sufficient nor could be counted on for its solidity6.
Jiwarangsan's Group photo no. 1 (2011) shows a group portrait composed of three rows of people. While the surface of the photo has been scraped away, most of the facial details are no longer recognisable. The scraped traces resemble strokes of white paint from afar. The ghostlike traces on the group portrait mirror the phantoms described by Torok. Although densely populated, the scene appears almost empty. Its missing details, along with the two vacant frames in the background, serve as a visual representation of the historical silences and unspoken secrets that continue to haunt the present.
In the quiet interplay of absence and presence, Jiwarangsan’s images become more than mere collages—they are the murmurs of a past that refuses to be forgotten. Within the muted gaps, the unsaid, the unpossessed, the repressed, a thousand voices converge in a timeless dialogue. Here, history is not fixed; it is a ghostly choir that brings us the uncanny secrets of others. As we stand before these silent portraits, we are invited to inhabit the space in between—a realm where every void sings, every shadow speaks, while time, ever so elusive, remains out of joint.
1 Farge, Arlette. ‘Traces by the Thousands’, para.5. In The Allure of the Archives, Translation edition. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015.
2 Rand, Nicholas. ‘Psychoanalysis with Literature: An Abstract of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s The Shell and the Kernel’. Oxford Literary Review 12, no. 1 (1 July 1990): 60. https://doi.org/10.3366/olr.1990.004.
3 Derrida, Jacques. Paper Machine. Translated by Rachel Bowlby, 2005, 163.
4 Villiers, John. ‘A New Capital for a New Dynasty: Bangkok from Rama I to Rama III (1782–1851)’. The Court Historian 17, no. 2 (December 2012): 142. https://doi.org/10.1179/cou.2012.17.2.001.
5 Brecht, Bertolt. ‘Questions From a Worker Who Reads’, 1935. https://www.marxists.org/archive/brecht/works/1935/questions.htm.
6 Patton, Paul, ed. Between Deleuze and Derrida. London: Continuum, 2003, 41.
Family, as a concept, differs drastically from the Eastern to the Western.
The secrets of our ancestors, as we may carry them, carry us through the timelessness of the unconscious.
