HOUSE CALLS
Artist(s)
Pinaree Sanpitak
Curator
Kittima Chareeprasit
copied
“Some dreams tremble, feel unstable. Turning over to turn over. And waking up to real uncertainties.” - Pinaree Sanpitak
Curated by Kittima Chareeprasit
Almost a decade has passed since her last solo show in Bangkok. In this exhibition Sanpitak returns with a large-scale audience - responsive installation consisted of hundreds of small sculptures that has never been shown in Thailand before. House Calls has evolved from Sanpitak’s installation presented on a remote island in Japan’s Seto Inland Sea during the 2019 Setouchi Triennale.
The work grew from eight small sculptures placed in the tatami room’s tokonoma — an alcove in a traditional Japanese house’s tatami room to place items for artistic appreciation, such as calligraphy scrolls and flower arrangements. This work may be viewed as an homage to the masters of lost crafts. Each piece is fabricated by hand using hand-torn stacks of natural paper placed on top of various vessels, containers, and utensils that were once part of Sanpitak’s home and collection.
The form of Breast Stupa combined with the backstories of each vessel and utensil, together which intersect viewers’ own backgrounds and experiences in creating new narratives of the sacred and the sensual. Almost 400 individual sculptures transforms a modern art space into a domestic living area. The sculptures are placed on motion-responsive shelves specially designed and fabricated by Bangkok-based Studiomake. The shelves are able to subtly vibrate in reaction to viewers’ movements, animating the sculptures and resembling the uncertainty of life under a home’s roof.
This introspective work portrays our collective experiences through this great pandemic, during which we have forged onward through lockdowns and self-quarantines – some of us alone or with others in our own residence, and others of us far away from home. House Calls pays homage to home, in both tangible and intangible ways, underlying the essence of domestic living as a core of human life and experience. It explores home as a quiet poetry, which may be disrupted suddenly as calm comes and goes, capturing the uncertainty of everyday existence
About the artist
Pinaree Sanpitak is a prominent artist of this time that was part of the first generation of Thai Contemporary Art. In the late 1980s, her artistic practice began and orbited around the celebration of the female body as a vessel of perception and experience, exploring the vessel and the mound as a basic and primal form. Her work involves a recurring motif of the female breast, resembling works of architecture dedicated to Buddhism known as stupas and ever so often an offering bowl. Various approaches of collage, drawing, printmaking, painting, and sculpture are explored through Sanpitak’s sensorial inquiries, revealing a keen sensitivity towards materials and through a variety of media: textiles, glass, ceramics and metals as such.
Over the past thirty years, Sanpitak has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Thailand and internationally. Her solo exhibitions were presented at Singapore Tyler Print Institute and Yavuz Gallery, Singapore (2019),The Winter Garden at Brookfield Place and Tyler Rollins Fine Art, New York, USA (2017), Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio, USA (2015), Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney, Australia (2014), and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, USA (2013). She has participated in various group exhibitions including at the Setouchi Triennale (2019), National Gallery Singapore (2017), Jakarta Biennale (2017), Lyon Museum of Contemporary Art, France (2015), The Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, USA (2015), and The 2nd Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale, Fukuoka, Japan (2002). She is the 2018 resident artist at STPI-Singapore Tyler Print Institute, Singapore. Sanpitak lives and works in Bangkok.
CURATOR:
Kittima Chareeprasit received her MA in Curating and Collections from Chelsea College of Arts. Her interest lies in contemporary art and culture which revolve around critical history, and social and political issues, and has been vocal against attempts to suppress those who use art as a form of political expression. 2016 she co-founded Waiting You Curator Lab, an experimental curatorial workshop and artists’ book publishing house. She also offers seminars in visual art, art management, and museology at Chiang Mai University. Despite all the difficulties caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, she is proud to have continued working with art institutions across Asia and Europe to bring excellent art programs to Thai audiences.
