Made it to the Bangkok Kunsthalle yesterday. A contemporary art centre with a German name. Three exhibitions on offer, but the one I liked most was ‘Spirits Melt to Flesh’, which is described as “Site-responsive moving image, sound, sculptural and photographic installations by eight Asian artists transform the raw spaces of the Bangkok Kunsthalle through variations of light and darkness, and reverberations of sound and voices in dialogue.”
I took some pictures but can’t process them until I get back to Sydney. Good start to my few weeks of Bangkok contemporary art, but if I were to comment, it would be that nothing there would be out of place in a high school art show. Someone whose name I can’t remember said the artist’s studio is like a social laboratory in which, armed with knowledge of the visual language, the artist creates a hypothesis and, presenting it to the public, asks, “What if?” Today, questioning groupthink is high-risk; the countercultural revolution ended decades ago.
Tomorrow I’ll be at the Bangkok Art and Cultural Centre. I went there today, but found it is closed on Mondays. What I did find was a nearby street art site where, the last time I was in Bangkok, I took quite a few pictures. At the time, it was a vacant block surrounded by the crumbling walls of old buildings, whereas today it is hidden behind a high sheet-metal fence. Through a gap in the gate, I saw that the block had been cleared and levelled; on the walls of neighbouring old buildings, some faded, peeling remnants of street art remained. For sure a, skyscraper is about to go up, whereas being close to the Art and Cultural Centre, it could have been a major open-air art site. It’s a mistake made by cities all over the world when places where communities lived are replaced with out-of-human-scale boxes. Walls that will never have a story to tell.