Where Do We Go From Here?

2021. Video installation, hand-drawn animation, drawing, etchings, oil paintings, photography

Installation view at Gallery VER, Bangkok

The age of planetary crisis makes our recent time acknowledging the palpable domination of the uncontested capitalism,

where the developments of technologies and interconnected networks accommodate different forms of free market that

ridicule the very concepts of geographic and political boundaries. This emerges several notions and questions centred

solely around how we could and should rest ourselves assured in prolonging our own privileged human beings in this new

world order? – however, it seems the real question being severely neglected is : do we leave anyone else and other entities

behind from the locomotive of escaping this crisis? In other words, it is crucial to subvert the concept of the human-world

relationship as a self-contained privilege that negates our other ensembles.  

So then, Where Do We Go From Here?, this is both Piyarat Piyapongwiwat's long-stay question and her title of exhibition

that examines what is at stake in the increasingly influxes of social and planetary crisis likely to prevail the coming history,

the way in which the economic stagnation and collapse of environmental conditions would agitate many new levels of

opposition – including labour and capital. 

Borrowing its title from Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (2013), her own exhibition in 2013 that

investigates how Capitalization perform in local special economic zones, Piyarat Piyapongwiwat's confusion from almost

a decade ago still remains unsolved, only to be enlarged and scattered. Her 2021 version continues to comprehend mode

of production of capitalism in a broader landscape, as well as searching for the escape route. In Where Do We Go From

Here? which represents the first large-scale solo installation of the artist in Bangkok, the exhibition encompasses

multi-disciplinary artistic mediums in artists' moving image, photography, painting, drawing and etching. 

Entitled the same name as the main exhibition, the artists' moving image installation is the centerpiece to the oeuvres

which visualizes the incorporation and conflict between cultural and political institutions, scientific infrastructures and global

ecosystems through juxtapositions of footages found in the online network and Piyarat's newly filming footages, as well as

the artist own narrative, pilgrimaging around the planetary crisis -  from lichen, human internal organs, the very first emergence

of Coronavirus and its aftermath, child labour in a mica mine in India, offshore and steel industries, an internment camp of

Uighurs in China, a detention camp in USA to a mass-produced consumer object like cosmetics that represents our cultural

imagery. 

– text by Pathompong Manakitsomboon