Organised by Bangkok Art and Culture Centre and the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration
Principal Corporate Supporter: Thai Beverage Public Company Limited
Media Partners: ONCE and KiNdconnext
Curated and Organised by Exhibition Department, Bangkok Art and Culture Centre
Advisory Curator: Penwadee Nophaket Manont<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Artists<\/strong> LOCAL MYTHS #2: Shifting Terrains Amid a world still unsettled by the reverberations of economic, political, and environmental crises, a condition of constant shifting has become a new norm of existence. Spaces once perceived as peripheral now reveal their significance as sites where power, negotiation and adaptation converge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Shifting Terrains does not refer solely to geographical space. It speaks to conditions of uncertainty, where the boundaries between nature and humanity, the local and the global, the past and the future are continually shifting and being rewritten.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As a contemporary art institution operating within a policy-connected framework, the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre extends its role beyond exhibition-making in the capital. It is equally committed to strengthening artistic ecosystems across the regions, with the aim of enabling artists from all parts of the country to develop on equal terms. Creating platforms for local artists to express themselves, fostering networks among communities, public sectors and educational institutions, both nationally and internationally, forms part of the Centre\u2019s long-term mission.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Local Networking Project was initiated in 2025 with the objective of opening space for artists from different regions to explore and articulate their own narratives through contemporary art. The project adopts a rotating, field-based approach across multiple locations nationwide. Artists engage directly with local contexts, researching myths, oral histories, overlooked histories and contemporary ways of life, and transform these materials into works that reflect shifting temporalities, memory and site-specific meaning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Following Local Myths #1: The Intrinsic Aesthetic, which focused on understanding forms of beauty rooted in local socio-cultural conditions, the second iteration shifts its framework from rootedness towards movement. It moves from what was once stable towards conditions that are shifting, fragmenting and overlapping in increasingly complex ways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This exhibition brings together nine bodies of work, each functioning as a tool for reading shifting contemporary landscapes through narratives embedded in land, water, the human body and collective memory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One work traces the story of a village that once sustained dozens of elephants, where this way of life came to an end when forest territories were redefined through state policy. It reflects a shifting relationship between humans, animals and conservation, which is not always grounded in the lived realities of local communities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Elsewhere, the construction of a reservoir has fundamentally altered a wetland ecosystem, disrupting the life cycles of aquatic species, migratory birds and traditional livestock practices. The shifting boundary between development and loss becomes sharply visible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the same time, cross-border pollution from mining activities reveals landscapes of power that extend beyond national boundaries. Arsenic, lead and mercury found in rivers are not merely chemical substances, but traces of global economic systems that infiltrate life processes in subtle ways, forming a slow-moving rupture across shifting environmental conditions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Mekong and Kok rivers, as vital arteries of the region, become sites where geopolitics, ecological systems and the lives of ethnic communities intersect. These communities face displacement, land loss and shifting conditions that reshape their ways of life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the central region, agricultural landscapes once associated with abundance are being reshaped by industrial systems, technology and global markets. Rice production is no longer governed solely by seasonal cycles, but is embedded within shifting economic structures, labour flows and centralised policies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Meanwhile, expanding urban landscapes reveal traces of transition, abandoned agricultural land, closed factories and excavated pits that have become new water resources. Water, as infrastructure, is no longer simply a resource, but a medium that connects shifting relationships between people, living beings and economic systems at a micro level.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the level of the body and culture, works exploring the lives of Lanna women reveal shifting identities through hair, which functions as a symbol of resistance, acceptance and the transmission of memory. Braiding becomes a language of intergenerational connection, gradually fading alongside shifting cultural and linguistic landscapes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In another layer of reflection, archival works open space for audiences to explore the histories of community-based art practices across different regions of the country. Documents, photographs, sound recordings and fragments of past activities do not merely preserve the past, but reveal shifting processes through which alternative forms of knowledge have emerged beyond centralised structures. Taken together, these works do not simply document change, but question the conditions that produce it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Shifting Terrains is thus both a space of crisis and of possibility. It reveals the fragility of existing systems while also pointing towards capacities for adaptation, resistance and the creation of new meanings within shifting conditions. If The Intrinsic Aesthetic in the previous iteration was about recognising values rooted in place, Shifting Terrains invites us to understand that these roots are not fixed. They are continually shifting, branching and negotiating with external forces.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ultimately, this exhibition does not offer definitive answers. Instead, it invites viewers to reflect on the landscapes they inhabit, to consider the shifting conditions in which they stand, and to ask how they might move within a world that is in constant transformation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Organised by Bangkok Art and Culture Centre and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":91317,"template":"","archives":[554],"locations":[585],"attendees":[],"sponsors":[],"class_list":["post-91318","event","type-event","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","archives-main-exhibition-789"],"yoast_head":"\n
Chalit Saphaphak, Preecha Raksorn and Vacharanont Sinvaravatn
Natpakhan Khemkhao
ThaDa LAB
Tananan Jaisawang
Baan Noorg Collaborative Arts and Culture
Farmjodjum Art Space
Sudaporn Teja
SIDETHINK : SOCIETY
ubatsat X Sridonchai Weavers<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Part of the Local Networking Project<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n