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SHAPES OF TIME
2024
4K video | 2.39:1 | 61.03 min. | color | sound


Shapes of Time is a cinematic meditation on how time is lived, accumulated, and materially inscribed within everyday spaces. Composed of sixty static shots, the film moves through sixty traditional, family-run businesses in Bangkok, each centred around a clock. Far from functioning as neutral instruments of measurement, these clocks appear embedded within dense constellations of objects: photographs of relatives and ancestors, portraits of the Thai king, devotional images of the Buddha, souvenirs, advertisements, and traces of wear. Each interior forms a layered still life, a unique archive in which personal memory, cultural belief, and historical duration converge. Rather than advancing a linear narrative of time, the film reveals temporality as a visual phenomena, shaping space by repetition, habit, and persistence. Each location bears the marks of continuity and erosion, suggesting that time here does not simply pass but settles, accumulates, and leaves residue. The clocks stand as silent witnesses, while subtle sonic textures—ambient noise, distant voices, fragments of music—suggest time as something that lingers rather than passes. At the same time, Shapes of Time captures a specific historical moment within Bangkok’s urban and cultural memory. Many of the interiors belong to a post-war era marked by Thailand’s alignment with the United States during the Cold War and by the regional conflicts that engulfed Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos between 1955 and 1975. This period brought soldiers, capital, and Western cultural influences into the city, reshaping its social and aesthetic landscape. Hotels, shops, and small businesses flourished, while musical traditions absorbed Western jazz, surf guitar, ballroom dance, and Latin rhythms, giving rise to distinctive hybrid genres such as Luk Krung and Luk Thung. Today, only a small number of these spaces remain intact, preserved almost involuntarily as temporal enclaves amid rapid urban transformation. The film approaches them not as nostalgic curiosities, but as living archives—sites where global history, local tradition, and everyday life intersect, thus unfolding as a audio-visual homage to Bangkok’s nostalgic modernity, while also acknowledging the city’s turbulent political past.



Camera / Sound / Edited: Kay Walkowiak
Sound Mix: Nigel Brown
Color Grading: Andi Winter
Production Assistant: Barbara Walkowiak
Special Thanks: Austrian Embassy Bangkok, The Yard Bangkok
Supported by: Federal State of Austria, City of Vienna




︎ Archive Film