DISPLACED the politics of ethnicity and religion in the art of Jakkai Siributr

21.02.2018

Sub-Series

6 pictures

Bangkok Art and Culture Centre

Jakkai Siributr is art is internationally-recognised and has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Asia, Europe and the United States. In Thailand, his work has been shown at The Art Centre, Chulalongkorn University, among others. Jakkai’s pieces are featured in numerous institutional collections, including the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; the Vehbi Koç Foundation, Istanbul; the Asian Civilisations Museum, Singapore, and the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Art.
Jakkai Siributr’s (b.1969) practice explores social contradictions and political frictions in Thailand and Southeast Asia today. Through a combination ofirony and empathy, it trains a critical eye on entrenched customs and power-holders, probing legitimacy. Jakkai’s oeuvre, if often textile-rich,encompasses all media of the contemporary, the artistselecting techniques, images, andvernacular materials which operate deliberately as conceptual clues via their embedded cultural references, socommunicatingcomplex ideas to broad publics.

Event Date : 01 April – 13 May 2017
Location: Studio, 4th floor
DISPLACED the politics of ethnicity and religion in the art of Jakkai Siributr, curated by Iola Lenzi for BACC, Jakkai extends his investigation of sectarian violence from Thailand to Myanmar.
The evolving place and content of Thai Buddhism have preoccupied the artist for over a decade. In 2014, Jakkai turned his attention to Thailand’s Deep South, spotlighting Muslim-Buddhistcommunal strife, on the rise since 2000. From this concern came the installation 78, which is being exhibited for the first time in Thailand in DISPLACED. 78 is a somber and pathos-charged installation tribute to 78 Thai Muslim civilians who died suffocated during their transportation in trucks by the Thai military in October 2004. Still andmeditative,78 evokes a stylised graveyard that through textile, script, and reference to mosque architecture,returns dignity to the disenfranchised dead. Jakkai’s artistic statement thus obliquely spurs critical thinking about religious politics in Thailand.

Continuing this thematic exploration, three years later Jakkai has produced his 2017 costume-based pieceChanging Room.This installation investigates how sectarian tensions affect different groups in the South:civilians of different ages and faiths, and soldiers from all parts of Thailand. Contrary to the introspective 78, Changing Roomplaces dynamic public intervention at the heart of its aesthetic as audiences try-on military jackets and Muslim-Malay headgear in the exhibition space. But Jakkai has transformed the songkok skull-caps worn by Muslim-Malay men. He has lined the white caps with camouflage-printed cloth, embroideredwith images of violence borrowed from media coverage of the troubled South. Camouflage jackets of the Thai military, for their part, have been embroidered with happy and optimistic scenes appropriated from drawings by ThaiMuslimschool children. Thus, the clothing installation, through the fun of dress-up, conveys a deeply serious tension as its imageryconfronts violent reality as depicted on the caps,with projected hope, as depicted on the jackets. The public is therefore compelled to reconcile these opposites, becominginvolved in the Southern problem. Via this confrontation, and the change of identity afforded by costume, Jakkai co-opts viewers into the lives of the “other”, Muslim Southerners. Audiences,now experiencing the conflict from the intimate vantage point of Changing Room, cross the sectarian divide.

In a third work, moving from Thailand to Myanmar, Jakkai scrutinizes the plight of Buddhist Burma’s persecuted minority Muslim Rohingyas. The Outlaw’s Flag examines the Rohingya’s displacement via video and a flag installation. Through21 invented “flags” —embroidered seeds and beads on Burmese longyi and monks’ robes— unclaimed by any nation, the artist points to the perniciousness ofnationalism that with its boundaries and exclusions, is often used to excuse abuses of power. Paired with a two-screen video cryptically narrating the stateless Rohingya’s exile from Burma, Jakkai’s piece, through visual drama and artistic metaphor playing on the flag emblem,beyond the fate of the Rohingya, brings attention to larger ethical issues of persecution and displacement, relevant everywhere today.

Arts Network Exhibition department

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Iola Lenzi is a Singapore-based curator and criticofSoutheast Asian art.
With a background in law and art history, she has conceptualised numerous institutional exhibitionsexploring the discourse-shaping place of socially-engaged practices in Southeast Asian art history. In Bangkok she has curated exhibitions at BACC and the Jim Thompson Art Center.She isthe author of Museums of Southeast Asia, andteaches graduate Asian art history in Singapore.

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