Artists defy Thai taboos at Bangkok Art Biennale
THAILAND - Standing in a massage parlour in the seedy glow of red strip lighting, Pueng turns to the camera. “I have a dream, to build a new house for my family”, she says. “Then I can open a small grocery shop”. It is a simple aspiration – the extraordinary aspect of it is that, as one of Thailand’s hundreds of thousands of sex workers, she has been given a public platform to speak at all. Alongside 17 other sex workers from the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai, Pueng appears in I Have Dreams, a video made by the artist Chumpon Apisuk and one of 75 works to feature in the inaugural Bangkok Art Biennale, which opened at the weekend and will run until February. “It is time that people face these women, look at them, listen to them”, said Apisuk, who has spent three decades working with women in the sex industry. “For once recognise their humanity and stop pretending they don’t exist.” He is not alone in using the biennale to showcase work that defies Thailand’s taboos, be they social stigmas or the political restrictions imposed by the military government that took over in a coup in 2014. The event has attracted some of the art world’s biggest names – from the performance artist Marina Abramović to the Danish installation art duo Elmgreen & Dragset, and the Japanese sculptor Yayoi Kusama – but it is the Thai artists, curators and the artistic director, Apinan Poshyananda, who have pushed the event to realms many have deemed bold for a country where censorship of the arts often weighs heavy.
Sensitive topics tackled include the conflict in Thailand’s Muslim deep south; the friction between the country’s Muslim and Buddhist communities; the abuse suffered by migrant workers; the plight of women in Thailand’s patriarchal society; the refusal to accept persecuted Rohingya refugees from Myanmar; and the plague of environmental pollution on Thailand’s rivers. The driving force behind the biennale is Poshyananda, who previously worked in the government’s Department of Culture but has curated the event with a spirit of defiance. “People said to me: ‘Why ask for trouble?’”, he said with a smile. “And yes, we chose to take the difficult path. But under the military we’ve gone through five years of intense scrutiny and it’s time to have a breather and be able to freely express ourselves.”
He confirmed there had been no government interference thus far, eventhough the city’s two most famous temples – Wat Pho and Wat Arun – are among the biennale’s venues, which required government approval. Poshyananda and many of the participating artists agreed that one of Thailand’s biggest problem in the arts was self-censorship.
(The Guardian)