James Dignan
(Dunedin Public Art Gallery)
IN ‘‘Performing Textiles’’, Thai artist Kawita Vatanajyankur explores repetitive manual labour and, in particular, the traditional roles assigned to women in Thai society, through a series of colourful, eyeopening videos.
In the four pieces, the artist uses her own body as a tool, becoming part of the handdriven machinery of the textile industry. She becomes alternately mop, loom shuttle, bobbin, and wool winder, with twists of red cord spooling round her body, or with her whitewigged head being unceremoniously and repeatedly dunked into pails of red dye.
The videos contain little other than the motion of the artist/artisan as a cog in the process, presented in stark skin tones against luridly bright backdrops. They do not need to present more; the message is not in the presentation of the process — which we watch as vicarious/voyeuristic spectators — but in our feeling of being somehow complicit in a process which is at the least tortuous and possibly torturous. The red dye and strand become the worker’s blood, their energy, their lifeforce.
By this simple method, the viewer is forced to consider the situation for manual labourers in traditional occupations, especially in developing countries. At the same time, it makes us consider the limits a body can endure in performing quotidian activities.