11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Kawita Vatanajyankur / The Scale of Injustice (from ‘Field work’ series) 2023 / Single-channel 4K video: colour, 8:30 minutes / Purchased 2024 with funds from The Spellbrook Foundation through the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / Image courtesy: The artist NOTES 1 According to global estimates, there are 24.9 million victims of forced labour throughout the world. While steps have been taken to address this issue in Thailand, the country still has high rates of labour exploitation and trafficking of vulnerable workers, including migrants from nearby Laos, Myanmar and Cambodia. The fishing industry in particular, which is run by criminal organisations, is fuelled by trafficked labourers. 2 In a 2022 interview, Vatanajyankur described witnessing female textile and garment workers in Bangalore protesting against their government wages that were too low for survival. Protests by workers in Thailand, Bangladesh and Cambodia also continue to occur, with little material change. See Rachel Ciesla and Robert Cook, interview with Kawita Vatanajyankur, ‘My body as a domestic object’, 29 June 2022, Kawita Vatanajyankur , <slficaa.artgallery.wa.gov.au/ interview/my-body-as-a-domestic- object/>, viewed July 2024. 3 Kawita Vatanajyankur, artwork proposal emailed to the author, 2023. 4 Vatanajyankur, artwork proposal. Kawita Vatanajyankur’s durational performances explore principles of labour and social equity to reveal the exploitation underpinning our consumer economy. The artist personifies a tool, implement or machine in her meticulously researched and physically demanding performances, which require intensive training to endure. While her pieces always commence with live performance, Vatanajyankur has become known for video documentations that deploy a captivating aesthetic of saturated colours. In Vatanajyankur’s first performative series, ‘Tools’ 2012–14, she investigated the blurred relationship between the female body and domestic objects used for quotidian tasks, from washing dishes to cleaning the floor. Subsequently, the artist turned her attention to vulnerable workers impacted by labour exploitation and trafficking, in industries such as garment manufacturing and agriculture. 1 The ‘Machinized’ 2016–ongoing and ‘Field work’ 2020–ongoing series were informed by research into labour conditions in factories, markets and farms, and adopted the plough and measuring scale as material metaphors for injustice and inequality. ‘Performing textiles’ 2018– was inspired by visits to small textile-producing villages and garment factories in Thailand and India where, despite ongoing protests, labour exploitation continues to infringe on basic human rights. 2 In works from this series, such as Spinning Wheel , Knit and Shuttle , Vatanajyankur performs the labour of the women’s tools with her own body to highlight these invisible workers and the conditions they endure. The Machine Ghost in the Human Shell 2024 is the third work in Vatanajyankur’s recent ‘Cyber Labour’ 2022–ongoing series, made in collaboration with Pat Pataranutaporn of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab. The premise of this work expands from the once-widely held assumption that artificial intelligence (AI) would supersede the physical, menial labour performed by humans. Instead, recent technologies demonstrate that AI is also capable of the type of creative thinking once considered the exclusive domain of humans (expressed by René Descartes’s well-known philosophical proposition, ‘I think, therefore I am’). As the artists point out: ‘If the intelligent machines are replacing human’s innovative and imaginative creativity, will humans’ jobs [in future] be working as their physical robots on tasks that machines (still) cannot perform?’ 3 Taking these implications further, Vatanajyankur and Pataranutaporn question whether AI’s capacity for creation and innovation will impact humanity’s motivation to ‘think’ — distorting and influencing our thoughts. Furthermore, they ask, if thoughts are an expression of human individuality and ‘souls’ (or ‘ghosts’ in Buddhism), does that mean that ‘the intelligent machines become the synthetic ghost and the human bodies become the corporeal machine’? 4 Or will an evolution occur in which natural and artificial, human and machine are connected in a new reality? In The Machine Ghost in the Human Shell , Vatanajyankur and Pataranutaporn engineer a choreographed dialogue — performed by Vatanajyankur and a holographic AI ‘ghost’ developed by Pataranutaporn — between human and machine to propose alternative scenarios regarding AI and the future of the human race. We see Vatanajyankur attempt to mentally resist and act against the machine’s control of her body through electronic stimulus. The fascination that compels us to watch her also makes us complicit in the abstraction of labour as viewers and consumers. Vatanajyankur’s compelling performances draw attention to the way a society based on materialism objectifies and dehumanises its citizens, actively confronting the legacies and consequences of late capitalism and the uncertain future of our relationship with the machine. ABIGAIL BERNAL KAWITAVATANAJYANKUR BORN 1987, BANGKOK, THAILAND LIVES +WORKS IN BANGKOK PAT PATARANUTAPORN BORN 1995, BOSTON, UNITED STATES LIVES +WORKS IN BOSTON KAWITAVATANAJYANKUR ANDPAT PATARANUTAPORN ARTISTS+PROJECTS ASIAPACIFICTRIENNIAL 204 — 205