Exhibition Opening | Harit Srikhao: Cave Stories 0

Cave Stories 0 is the first public iteration of an evolving body of work, shaped by a story Srikhao has hold on to since 2018 and developed during his recent residency at YDP. Drawing on local folktales and psychological studies, the exhibition invites visitors to descend into an inner landscape woven from photography, moving images, drawings and puppetry.

The project grew from the 2018 Tham Luang cave rescue, where twelve boys from a junior football team and their coach were saved after being trapped in a cave in Northern Thailand for seventeen days. Despite the official narrative of the rescue as a national triumph, some quieter voices remained unheard. Srikhao followed the journey of one of the rescued young footballers from Thailand to the UK, where the young man went to study and later took his own life in 2023. This loss fractures the story of the miracle, revealing the weight it could not hold.

Rather than retelling the story as a single account, Srikhao attends to its silences, residues and afterlives through acts of reimagining. Cave Stories 0 reflects a loss of faith in narratives and images that extract, while still offering a radical hope: that by attending to the silence and the void, by bridging fragments and allowing narratives to diverge and reconverge, the finality of a hopeless ending might be held in suspension. In this space, where time is nonlinear and worlds briefly intersect, everyone might be able to begin again, differently.

About the artist

Harit Srikhao (b. 1995, Bangkok) lives in Pathum Thani. Rooted in photography, his multimedia practice engages with interconnected themes spanning the aesthetics of power and bodily autonomy, ranging from diaries documenting fleeting moments to staged imagery. For Srikhao, photography functions as a method for addressing delays in understanding, coming to terms with and recomposing relationships in the world. This approach is driven by an intense effort to grapple with his personal experience of being both a subject and an object: surrendering control over one’s image, struggling to reclaim one’s agency and the process of giving it a body.

Srikhao has a BFA from King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology Ladkrabang in Bangkok and an MFA from the Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti in Milan. His work has been collected by museums including Musée de l’Elysée (Photo Elysée), Lausanne; Foam Photography Museum, Amsterdam; and Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts, Yamanashi.

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