PCAI is glad to announce the participation of PCAI collection artist Korakrit Arunanondchai at staging grounds, of The Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
staging grounds is a nine-day festival of installations, performances, and public programs exploring how culture is shaped by acts of return and re-animation.
Taking place February 20–28, 2026, the festival brings together five international artists—Korakrit Arunanondchai, Jewyo Rhii, Na Mira, Samson Young, and Li Yi-Fan—whose practices illuminate how art restages experience across time.
Curated by Katherine C. M. Adams (Associate Curator, Time-Based Visual Arts), staging grounds unfolds across EMPAC’s architecturally distinct spaces.
The artists’ works are embedded within the building’s theaters, studios, and theater lobby, drawing attention to how memory and experience are mediated through the infrastructures that hold them.
On view Arunanondchai’s work, The Ghost Will Take Us by the Hand, on February 20-21.
Arunanondchai inverts traditional theater by placing the audience onstage as performance, video, fog, light, and sound overtake the empty auditorium, culminating in a lone dancer emerging from a haunted field of seats.
Created in collaboration with Tosh Basco (choreography/dance), Aaron David Ross (music direction), and DUCKUNIT (lighting design), the work reimagines theatrical mythmaking as a way to contour collective memory.
This project is followed by an installation of Arunanondchai’s Unity for Nostalgia that extends the work’s questions through thermal imaging and spectral environments.
More information here.
Activity aligned with Goals 4, 5, 7, 10, 11, 12,15, 16, 17
