7 May 2022

copied

Public Program: A talk session with Phaptawan Suwannakudt and Patrick Flores on Art research, practice, and history.

 



Curator statement: PATRICK FLORES

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.