Chalks are a traditional tool of art therapy, he adds, because of the directness of their contact with the body, the immediacy of the experience of using them. “You have to use your fingers, it’s a direct point between the subject and the object that you’re working on. There’s no barrier. And you let yourself feel something.”
Srikhao’s work in therapy profoundly transformed his memories of the abuse he had experienced. “I spent a lot of time dealing with it, through therapy and also in making artworks,” he says. “After that, I began thinking a lot about the agency of the subject, and how artwork, or how creating art, can reverse that role, can take back agency and power.”
These early therapeutic explorations became Cumulus (2023), a photobook that revisited and reconfigured his teenage photographic archive as a way of re-encountering this period on his own terms. Imago (2024), a project in film and mixed media, reclaimed the photographs that had been used to blackmail him. “The function of blackmail is to make you disconnect from others, and to make you disconnect from yourself,” Srikhao observes. “But the same photograph, in the first place, was intended for you to connect with yourself and others.”
In Imago Srikhao boldly revisits the works and, by transforming them, restores them to their original purpose. “We sliced, crumpled, burned and painted over photographs taken during that time, transforming the deep wounds of our past into ephemeral light and shadow,” states a narrator in the work’s accompanying text.
“I’m very interested in the idea of disconnection, because I think it’s key to a lot of trouble in the world,” Srikhao tells me. “When you disconnect from yourself, it’s not good. It disconnects you from other people. But in contrast, when you connect with yourself, it makes you connect with the world, and with others. I think about this a lot, and how photography can be a way of making people – or making the photographer – reconcile with the world again.”
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