Shane Bunnag gets ‘trippy’ in Greece

Thai-Briton Shane Bunnag will show his photos of “souls in touch with the elemental spirits” in the exhibition “Dryopes” as part of the Project New Visions Series 3 at Bangkok’s Kathmandu Gallery from May 6 to June 24.
Raised in Greece and England before earning a history masters from the University of Edinburgh, Shane depicts in his images the nature entities of Mani, the Greek peninsula where he spent his childhood. 
He captures the soul of each site through long-exposure shots of a model dancing in worship of the local gods. The resulting images are hallucinatory, like the “sacred mushroom” visions celebrated in religious rites of ancient Greece.
“This project evolved out of time spent in a mountain village in Greece, a long-lost childhood home, in early 2016,” says Shane, who divides his time between Bangkok and Paris. 
“What began as an experiment became a compulsion to capture the kinetic energy of the dancer’s motion as she traced out a kind of text upon the ancient landscape, revealing the patterns of life, lost epiphanies and discarded selves that we encounter in familiar places.” 
Shane’s Greek-language film “All for Nothing” was shown at the World Film Festival of Bangkok in 2006.
New Visions curator Manit Sriwanichpoom says that, with these “trippy images of a wood nymph dancing among stars and in bright moonlight, Shane inspires us to take pleasure in a spiritual landscape rather than merely the surface beauty of nature”. He sees “an essential beauty far beyond the banal clich้s of the postcard landscape”.