Installation view of Wantanee Siripattananuntakul’s video work III. Photos: Tanatchai Bandasak
As the title “Human AlieNation” suggests, the current exhibition at The Art Centre, Silpakorn University, concerns a sense of alienation on many levels, from individually, groups in society, to collectively as a nation.
Co-organised with Thammasat University’s Faculty of Sociology and Anthropology, the fact that curator Kamolwan Boonphokaew is an anthropologist has doubly underlined that idea. She is an outsider in the field of visual art yet she sees the commonality in artists and anthropologists in the way they reflect situations and movements that are currently happening in society.
Initially, it was just her interest in art and frequent visits to art openings that led her to observe that, just like society at large, the Thai art scene is comprised of groups of people who are estranged from one another. Her project proposal to the art centre was to invite four artists — Nopchai Ungkavatanapong, Nipan Oranniwesna, Chitti Kasemkitvatana and Wantanee Siripattananuntakul — and ask them to interpret the idea of alienation and create works through their own aspects and means.
“The topic of the dialogue is the current condition of Thai society,” wrote Kamolwan in the exhibition text. “During this time of transformation, a group of people on one side tries hard to hold on to the way things have been, while those on another eagerly anticipate the passing of old days and the arrival of new.”
Kamolwan elaborated further that the outcome of that is how, in this labyrinth of cultural change, people are driven to view those living in the same culture as the other. Wantanee’s three video works reflect that, and they are perhaps the most easily accessible in the show as they speak about the alienation in classes of people which results from prolonged political conflicts.
The first piece, entitled III, features a poorly-dressed labourer sitting on the floor and peeling piles of onions while tears are welling up in his eyes. A video next to that features a woman singing without a voice coming out and one guesses that she represents the middle class when we see that the third and final video is of an elegantly dressed man imperiously conducting non-existent orchestra — obviously a depiction of the elites.
“In both the social and art worlds, there is a current effort to revive the mechanism of peer grouping based on a political ideology,” wrote Kamolwan. “The act of social labelling, categorising, and delineation as ‘friend’ or ‘enemy’ is experiencing a resurgence. The consequence is the promotion of the voice of the in-group to be heard louder, while that of all others is increasingly ignored.”
Also on the ground floor are two of the works by Nopchai Ungkavatanapong. His works feature his usual neon and electronic components and through them, the artist argues that we are alienated from one another simply because of our perceptions and backgrounds.
His installation work Tiptoeing Around The Stars, for example, looks like a bunch of coat hangers chained together, but he is actually referring to the Coathanger asterism, a star constellation. Another piece installed on the floor, entitled Definition, is a plus sign-shaped block which could be a multiply sign if looking from a different angle.
“For Nopchai, stories, statuses and perceptions toward surrounding objects [and, possibly, also people] are the results of social production,” wrote Kamolwan. “Being an object, in his view, engages not only the matter of physicality, but also hidden significance.”
Upstairs, Chitti’s installation works are about bringing historical incidents from other places to be reproduced in this space and through them stories of ordinary people who are disenfranchised from mainstream history are told.
Meanwhile, Nipan’s works use the history of the art space in exploring the sense of otherness in a marginalised group of Burmese people in Thailand. The snaking wood structure on the floor, entitled 2401, for instance, is the small-scale real border between Thailand and Myanmar which is 2,401km long.
Chitti and Nipan’s works in particular are by no means easily and immediately graspable, and Kamolwan said that the unwillingness on the artists’ part to explain their works is why some viewers may feel alienated from art. The archive — photos and interviews with the four artists Kamolwan has compiled after observing closely their work processes for six months — on display for viewers to browse, then, is Kamolwan’s means to destroy that gap between artists and viewers. It’s only when we read the interviews that we make a guess as to, for instance, how the running man in the Nipan video work Signal creates a dialogue with the history of the art space itself.
“All of the sculpture works of Nipan included in this show are a metaphorical visual landscape of a borderline marking the separated areas of those from the inside and the outside, and of those from the same and other group, who share living space in a singular society — a town or even a country,” wrote Kamolwan.
Nopchai Ungkavatanapong’s Tiptoeing Around The Stars. Photo: Tanatchai Bandasak
This source first appeared on Bangkok Post Lifestyle.