Manit’s Five Generals Who Return Happiness To Thailand. Photos: Manit Sriwanichapoom
With any political fight, it’s hardly the end when street clashes are over — camps demolished, protesters injured or dead and the authorities able to curb the movement or finally comply with its demands. The fight continues and what’s perhaps more significant than action on the streets is finding the desired spot in a page in history, in people’s minds. The question is: how are we to be remembered?
“Fear” — Manit Sriwanichapoom’s latest photography and video show at H Gallery, Tang Contemporary Art and Kathmandu Photo Gallery — is largely about that. How do we remember the movement of the People’s Democratic Reform Committee (PDRC), which after months of street protests finally brought about the military takeover more than two years ago?
At Kathmandu Photo Gallery, a series of photos named “Ratchadamnoen Motor Show” presents overturned official vehicles, which were painted with the colours of the Thai flag by protesters; this resulted from riot police’s attempts to dismantle the Dharma Army encampment on Ratchadamnoen Avenue in February, 2014.
Over at Tang Contemporary Art, sandbags scattered on the floor and metal pipes put together as structures for photo exhibits have summoned up the tense political atmosphere from late 2013 to early 2014. On one side, a group of photos are arranged into a panoramic view of a makeshift wall made of tyres and sandbags set up by The Student and People Network for Thailand’s Reform, one of the groups allied with the PDRC, after they successfully seized the streets around Government House.
Upstairs at Kathmandu Photo Gallery, where a series of close-up, pixelated shots of five generals behind the 2014 coup entitled Five Generals Who Return Happiness To The People is hung, fast-forwards to the present phase under the military’s tight control.
Political inclinations aside, Manit has done a good job in documenting a historical event and transferring the gravity and mood of the situation into an art space with his photographic composition and installation design. His close-up and pixelated shots of generals are subtle in a way that seems a salute but is actually a critical look at figures in power — that the photos are blurred and show no faces plays with the fact that we have had as many as 12 coups since the 1932 Siamese Revolution.
But all this seems to go out of synch once the accompanying texts are taken into account. For instance, in Fading History, which features shots of lively PDRC protesters in clothes and accessories with the colours of the Thai flag, it seems like Manit was there to document people as a photographer with a certain degree of objectivity. The text accompanying it, however, seems to take it to a slightly different direction than intended, taking up a lamenting tone and investing it with the sentimentality which seems non-existent in the photos themselves.
“As if these protests had never been, the great mass of protesters vanishing from our eyes,” reads the text. “How could this be? It was a historically significant protest participated in by millions of citizens who managed to shut down Bangkok for months in unprecedented ways. Where are their stories? Does anyone remember?”.
Likewise, that the photos of generals are titled straightforwardly as Five Generals Who Return Happiness To The People and that the coup is described in the text as a reflection of “the weakness of the country’s democratic system which is unable to solve problems without intervention by extra-parliamentary powers” suggests the legitimacy of the putsch and rids these photos of their initial vague and critical tone.
Manit’s works without the texts speak of the PDRC movement with a sense of heroism yet critically towards the coup and even to how the military has governed the country so far. With the texts, however, it’s a different story altogether.
It is over at H Gallery that “Fear” is most poignant, partly for the unspeakableness of the subject and partly for Manit’s deceptively simple approach to it. All the tension — not just from the rest of the portraits hung at H Gallery but also the gravity of recent political turmoils presented at the other two galleries — is concentrated in just one photograph which was printed on canvas. It gives you chills despite the fact that the canvas in question is totally empty.
A piece from Manit’s ‘Royal Monuments’ series. Manit Sriwanichapoom
This source first appeared on Bangkok Post Lifestyle.