Gallery VER

The age of planetary crisis makes our recent time acknowledging the palpable domination of the uncontested capitalism, where the developments of technologies and interconnected networks accommodate different forms of free market. This emerges several notions and questions centred solely around how we could and should rest ourselves assured in prolonging our own privileged living beings in this new world order? – however, it seems the real question being severely neglected is : do we leave anyone else and other entities behind from the locomotive of escaping this crisis?

So then, Where Do We Go From Here?, this is both Piyarat Piyapongwiwat’s long-stay question and her title of exhibition that examines what is at stake in the increasingly influxes of social and planetary crisis likely to prevail the coming history, the way in which the economic stagnation and collapse of environmental conditions would agitate many new levels of opposition.

Piyarat Piyapongwiwat continues to comprehend mode of production of capitalism from a local sense into broader landscape, as well as searching for the escape route. Where Do We Go From Here? encompasses multi-disciplinary artistic mediums in artists’ moving image, photography, painting, drawing and etching. The artists’ moving image installation is the centerpiece to the oeuvres which visualizes the incorporation and conflict between cultural and political institutions, scientific infrastructures and global ecosystems through juxtapositions of footages found in the online network and Piyarat’s newly filming footages, as well as the artist own narrative.

About Artist:

Piyarat Piyapongwiwat (b. 1977, Phrae, Thailand) works with various media. Her practice centers on documentation as a method to expose and question the conditions and implications of our globalised economy and social issues. Whether it is video, photograph, or installation, she often uses these various media not merely as a record keeping, but as an attempt to map our inter-connected world through voices of individuals. Piyarat is a 2017 recipient of the Japan Foundation Asia Center Fellowship Program. She holds a BFA from Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Montpellier Agglomération, France. She has presented works locally and internationally including the 6th Asian Art Biennial: Negotiating the Future, Taiwan, the 12th Gwangju Biennale: Imagined Borders, South Korea and 2016 Seismograph: Sensing the City – Art in the Urban Age, Art Stage Singapore. Her work is held in Museum collections including Singapore Art Museum, Maiiam Contemporary Art Museum and Bangkok Art and Culture Centre.

About Guest Curator:

Pathompong Manakitsomboon (b.1983, Chiang Mai) is an independent curator and lecturer, working primarily in the areas of artists’ moving-image and media art, with experiences across the fields of curatorial practice and filmmaking. He was previously a curator at Bangkok World Film Festival and assistant curator for Thai Pavilion, Venice Biennale (2013). His recent curatorial works are Toward the Tactile Visions (2018) and Laura Mulvey in Thailand: The Male Gaze in 21st Century (2020), for instance. He was invited to participate in Berlinale Talent 2014 and the sixth Oberhausen Seminar in Germany (2019). Pathompong holds a Master’s in Film Curating from Birkbeck, University of London where he graduated with Distinction. Pathompong is currently a full-time lecturer on moving image and time-based media, Department of Media Arts and Design, Faculty of Fine Art, Chiang Mai University.