Special Exhibitions

22

Curators: Natchapol Krongboonying, Bariyard.io
Selected by: Special project’s BACC pop⋅up
Principal Supporter: Seacon Development Co., Ltd.

The exhibition invites you to reconsider your own frames of thought by allowing you to “sit” and “listen” to answers spoken through other people’s “chairs.” Within a constructed space, the “selves” and “voices” of individuals from different life backgrounds are brought together and arranged through ordinary plastic chairs—each standing in for different social groups that might exist within any particular area of your city.

The exhibition emerged from a field exploration of a neighborhood in Bangkok, where we observed the coexistence of multiple groups of people. Although these groups inhabit the same area—living and making a livelihood within closely layered and adjacent spaces—their interactions with one another remain minimal, marked by distance rather than exchange. Each group sustains its own individual culture and informal social rules to maintain order, giving rise to distinct frameworks of class perception and group-specific meanings.

The exhibition “22” seeks to present the conflicts of meaning that arise within urban space—through the shifting significance of a plastic chair depending on who occupies it, or through a single question that yields different answers across social groups. By doing so, the exhibition reveals the gaps in mutual understanding that shape life in the city, and invites viewers to question urban space itself: in our desire to see the city transformed, do we still

see or hear one another? Or can our imagined ideal spaces be formed without listening to anyone else at all?

Viewers are free to participate in the exhibition as they wish—by choosing which chair to sit on, by moving chairs, or by rearranging them altogether. These actions are not external to the work; rather, they are integral to the process through which the meanings of the space and of each chair shift in response to the viewer’s own decisions.

Sitting on certain chairs activates the exhibition’s mechanism, triggering recorded voices that respond to the same question. Shaped by differing perspectives, experiences, and life contexts, these voices are not ordered by right or wrong, but are instead allowed to coexist—reflecting the layered and overlapping meanings that inhabit the same urban space.

Finally, this exhibition would not have been possible without the contributions of many individuals. I would like to extend our sincere thanks to Bariyard.io for the initial idea of using chairs; to Romravee Patel and Sivakorn Anantasarn for co-developing the first version of the work; and to Thanet Asawakanchanakij for developing the sound-playback mechanism. I am also deeply grateful for the warmth and encouragement of friends and collaborators, which together have made possible the exhibition you are experiencing today.