In many ways, "Condemned To Be Free", a duo exhibition which just opened last week at WTF Gallery, is in a constant state of flux. On the first floor, artist Kritsada Duchsadeevanich looks simultaneously at the transformation of his own political ideology and that of the country's political history. On the upper floor, painter Tawan Wattuya leaves out his watercolours and turns the gallery into an experimental space where the lines between art and activism, the authority of an artist and voice of ordinary people, are blurred.
"The exhibition functions as an experimental platform for these two artists who are otherwise completely different in terms of their process and their choice of form and media," reads curator Penwadee Nophaket Manont's statement. "It charts their own journey to freedom, not as a heroic triumph but as an exploration that could well go wrong and lead to nothing."
What Penwadee is interested in is the shift both in these artists' political ideology and the way they execute their works.
"I know it's something I shouldn't do but I have always been observant as to which side of the political divide this and that artist belong to," said Penwadee. "But then we thought that that has been done before, so I was looking for cases which are more complicated than that."
Confronting, Tawan Wattuya's collaboration with New Democracy Movement's Chonthicha Jangrew and Apisit Supnaphaphan. Photos courtesy of Penwadee Nophaket Manont
In Kritsada's case, it's obvious which side he has switched to. What's stunning about the work is how that idea is conceptualised into a site-specific installation which reflects in parallel the Thai timeline of successive authoritarian rule.
The centrepiece is the foil wallpaper on walls with hidden codes under, signifying each year of all the coups Thailand has gone through. For the 2014 coup, for example, visitors will feel under the foil a tiny engraving of "10.066929", the number of inches which has been converted from 25.57cm (2557 being the Buddhist year for 2014). Each engraving is also rested on a ruler-like shape whose length varies according that number, too, so it is a 10.066929-inch-long tag for the 2014 coup.
"I have always been interested in this shift of ideological belief in a person, why and how this person has changed, or why somebody hasn't been able to realise the truth," said Penwadee. "It's something which may not be easy to explain through words so I thought it would be interesting to invite Kritsada to explore such a state through his art."
Kritsada's other pieces include a tiny collage consisting of bits and pieces of coup-makers put together and a mock-up of a window where the view is a solid wall, again covered with foil wallpaper, and chances are there's another message hidden under that again.
Besides a curatorial role, Penwadee is a cultural activist, and she has been with a group which has been politically and socially active since opposing the 2013 Bangkok Shutdown protests which led to the latest coup the following year. With Tawan's work upstairs, this is where Penwadee's role both as a cultural activist and curator feels the strongest. The walls on the second floor are painted dark and sombre, and we see none of Tawan's usual relatively bright watercolour paintings. Most of the sketches put on display on tables in the centre or paintings on the walls are done instead by two student members of the New Democracy Movement, Chonthicha Jangrew and Apisit Supnaphaphan, who were imprisoned for their political activities. Together with words like "I am also a human being!" or "In Thai prisons, we become animals" written by these protesters, Tawan incorporated his own drawings which directly and indirectly respond to his collaborators' personal sufferings.
"With this method, he invites the audiences to discover what it is like to be creative under conditions of severely limited freedom," wrote Penwadee in the statement. "And to discover whether a kind of paradoxical freedom can be achieved within these severe limitations."
"Condemned To Be Free" is on display until Mar 31 at WTF Gallery, Sukhumvit 31.
