Leave it and Break no Hearts
Artist(s)
Phaptawan Suwannakudt
Samak Kosem
Curator
Patrick Flores
copied
"Phaptawan Suwannakudt and Samak Kosem are led to the edges or fringes of what can be visible or intelligible. In doing so, their work touch the condition of being minor in a social order governed by dominant consciousness"
Curated by Patrick Flores
There are very few narratives and voices to restate the precariousness of sentiments in minoritarian contexts that intersect with gender, religion, and nationality. Undifferentiated fears are part of living in freedom, to access facts and truths and freedom of expression are fundamental to our existence. The project Leave it and Break no Hearts investigates the notion of the minoritarian within religious agencies in Thailand.
In this project, Phaptawan ‘s work echoes women’s issues related to Buddhist belief in regional Thailand, while Samak focuses on queerness in Muslim culture. Each of their works and trajectories explores their identities with the narratives of non-human forms in the context of Islam and Buddhism in Thailand. Being non-human implies a void or illegitimacy of human expression, a barrier for humans’ ability to voice, refuse, or deny.
Leave it and Break no Hearts includes paintings, video installation, research paper, and public programs with Suranaree University of Technology (Nakorn Ratchaseema, Thailand), Communication Design-CommDe- at Department of Industrial Design, Faculty of Architecture, Chulalongkorn University (Bangkok, Thailand), and A.E.Y Space (Songkhla, Thailand).
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Exhibition Statement: Patrick Flores, curator
The exhibition of Phaptawan Suwannakudt and Samak Kosem dwells on moments and spaces that are on the cusp of being formed, subtly moving across zones of fragile encounter between persons, things, flora, fauna, even spirits. Their projects arise from the equally delicate contact with narratives that speak of poignant memory but also of urgent anxiety.
The methods that animate the projects of Phaptawan and Samak are patient and attentive to the nuances of subjectivity. They include field work and residency, a mindful listening to story and sound, and a sensitive crafting of image, fiction, and atmosphere. They confront as well structures that tend to take hold tenaciously like religion or history, gender or culture. The artists loosen this grip and let both mythology and everyday life play out more fluidly like water or more elusively like light.
Phaptawan visits Samrit in Nakhon Ratchasima. Pondering the universe around the cabin that cuts through a small village, she fishes out the details of an abode, the area “where a house had once sunk.” Nearby is the monument of the Battlefield of Samrit that honors the deed of the women who had defended Thailand from Laos. This is a fundamental reference in Phaptawan’s visual proposition. Further texture around these biographies is offered by the tales of the characters she had met in the province: the blind elder; the women in a funeral; and school girls rehearsing a dance. Another aspect in her ensemble is a flickering allusion to the King Georges River in Casula, New South Wales dissolving into a tree from the same site.
For his part, Samak proposes a film that proceeds from the enigmatic plot of a young woman walking into the rubber field behind her village early in the night. This habit of straying into the plantation has made her strange and prone to the rebuke of the community. At this point, common tropes between Phaptawan and Samak surface: the nonhuman, the movement within the environment like the field and the forest, and agents who are made to fit within schemes yet slip away. Like the specter of history in Phaptawan’s monument, the scenario of Samak is set during Ramadan nights, the sacred, if not liminal, time for Muslims who fast and pray at the Masjid. Moreover, Samak reflects on a potential queerness by painting the ambivalent figure of the Muslim buraq, the half-human and half-horse that is the vehicle of prophets, on prayer carpets. Through field notes, he also remembers his confounding time in the Islamic school via the homoerotic sarong that he investigates for its abstraction, ornament, and violence.
Phaptawan and Samak are led to the edges or fringes of what can be visible or intelligible. In doing so, their work touch the condition of being minor in a social order governed by dominant consciousness. This exhibition is an invitation to reconsider this order and inhabit another cosmology through art works, letters between the artists, research, and collaboration with students from Chulalongkorn University.
About the artist
Phaptawan Suwannakudt (b. 1959, Thailand, lives and works in Sydney, Australia)
Born in 1959, Phaptawan Suwannakudt graduated from Silpakorn University, Thailand, with a degree in English and German. Her early childhood involved reading her father’s manuscripts, the late master Paiboon Suwannakudt who was a writer, poet, dancer, and choreographer, and learning Thai mural painting drafting skills. She later led a team of painters that worked in Buddhist temples throughout Thailand during the 1980s-1990s. She was also involved in the women artists’ group exhibition Tradisexion (1995) and biennial event Womanifesto (1997 – 2008). Phaptawan relocated to Australia in 1996 and completed an MVA at Sydney College of the Arts, Sydney University. She works in interdisciplinary forms that include painting, sculpture, and installation.
Her work is based on lived experience and informed by socio-political issues through telling stories and intersections between different human experiences. It has often dealt with issues of empathy and commensurability informed by Buddhism, women’s issues, and cross-cultural dialogue. She has exhibited extensively in Australia, Thailand and internationally including the 18th Biennale of Sydney: All Our Relations (2012); Traces of Words: Art and Calligraphy from Asia, Museum of Anthropology, UBC, Vancouver, Canada (2017); the inaugural Bangkok Art Biennale, Thailand (2018); Asia TOPA, Art Centre Melbourne (2020); The National at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (2021), Sydney; a collaborative project with Sue Pedley Line work: The River of the Basin scheduled at the Lewers’ House, Penrith Regional Gallery New South Wales (2021); and an installation work Sleeping Deep Beauty for ESOK in Jakarta Biennale 2021. Her works are in public collections including the Art Bank Sydney, the National Art Gallery of Thailand, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Australia, and the National Gallery of Singapore.
Samak Kosem (b. 1984, Bangkok, Thailand, lives and works in Chiang Mai, Thailand)
Born in 1984, Samak Kosem graduated from Chiang Mai University, Thailand with a BS in Anthropology in 2009 and an MA in Social Development in 2013. Currently, he is a PhD student in Social Sciences at Chiang Mai University and a research fellow at the Center of Excellence on Women and Social Security at Walailak University, Thailand. He investigates transnational sexuality frameworks that circulate and connect to sexual discourse, practice, and subjectivities on an individual migratory and religiosity. His works portray through moving image, photography, object and text. His project of ‘Nonhuman Ethnography’ (2017-ongoing) in Southern Thailand is considering how queerness is embodied in Muslim culture through the contexts of nonhuman relations. In 2021-2022, he is an Erasmus+ exchange fellow at the School of Humanities, Tallinn University, Estonia and teaches on ethnicity in Southeast Asia at the International Studies (ASEAN-China) Program, Thammasat University. His artworks are shown at galleries and museums in Malaysia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan, and Philippines. Samak's writing has recently been published by the Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia (2020) and the Taiwan Journal of Southeast Asia Studies (2020).
CURATOR:
Patrick Flores is Professor of Art Studies at the Department of Art Studies at the University of the Philippines, which he chaired from 1997 to 2003, and Curator of the Vargas Museum in Manila. He is the Director of the Philippine Contemporary Art Network. He was one of the curators of Under Construction: New Dimensions of Asian Art in 2000 and the Gwangju Biennale (Position Papers) in 2008. He was a Visiting Fellow at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in 1999 and an Asian Public Intellectuals Fellow in 2004. Among his publications are Painting History: Revisions in Philippine Colonial Art (1999); Remarkable Collection: Art, History, and the National Museum (2006); and Past Peripheral: Curation in Southeast Asia (2008). He was a grantee of the Asian Cultural Council (2010). He co-edited the Southeast Asian issue with Joan Kee for Third Text (2011). He convened in 2013 on behalf of the Clark Institute and the Department of Art Studies of the University of the Philippines the conference “Histories of Art History in Southeast Asia” in Manila. He was a Guest Scholar of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles in 2014. He curated an exhibition of contemporary art from Southeast Asia and Southeast Europe titled South by Southeast and the Philippine Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2015. He was the Artistic Director of Singapore Biennale 2019.