The Ninth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

155 ARTISTS 18/28: The Singhaseni Tapestries (details) 2017–18 14 parts: Cotton, silk, synthetic fabric, embroidery, found fabrics, disassembled garments, luggage trunks, sound / Installed dimensions variable / Images courtesy: The artist / Proposed for the Queensland Art Gallery Collection Born 1969, Bangkok, Thailand Lives and works in Bangkok Jakkai Siributr has become known for his immersive installations of sewn and embroidered fabrics. 18/28: The Singhaseni Tapestries 2017–18, featured in APT9, is a major new project of personal significance for the artist. Fascinated with needlework since his childhood in Bangkok, Siributr trained in textiles to postgraduate level in the United States. He has since turned hand-stitched embroidery on fabric into installations that engage with social and cultural pressures, and with events and sites where communal attitudes have translated into violence. Drawing on the principles of Buddhism, which he would like to see broadly adopted in daily life, he also brings people together and offers them a way to express themselves through embroidery in projects outside his art practice. Previous projects focused on the dilution of Buddhist values in consumer society, such as in his convenience store Karma Cash & Carry 2010, where good fortune could be bought and sold. Transient Shelter 2014 was a meditation on the transience of worldly success and the quasi-mystical associations that can be attached to the trappings of social status. In all his installations, Siributr balances the visual sensuality of his medium with its diverse and often dark subject matter. Aware of the various lenses through which we view historical events — personal, institutional or partisan — he has recently focused on giving form to unofficial histories that are absent from, or misrepresented in, official accounts in Thailand. In particular, the sectarian friction between Muslim and Buddhist communities in South-East Asia is an ongoing concern for the artist. His room-sized 78 2014 was a meditative space for reflection on the death of 78 Thai Muslim men who suffocated in a Thai Army transport truck in 2004. Visitors to Changing Room 2017 could try on Thai Army jackets, which Siributr embroidered with drawings by Muslim children. He also stitched imagery from Thai news media on Muslim kapiyoh head coverings. Viewers could wear both, thereby physically uniting Muslim, Buddhist and nationalist perspectives — forces driving separation in the south of the country. Siributr’s art advocates for not forgetting the lives of individuals who are submerged beneath popular or institutionally endorsed histories. He celebrates photographs as visual repositories of memory, while encouraging the viewer to question the formal narratives that enter official histories and archives. Siributr has embroidered images from family photographs around the hem of each of the five dresses in 18/28: The Singhaseni Tapestries , which belonged to his mother; the images relate to passages from her diaries. His grandmother was from the Singhaseni family, 1 and these dresses and large, hand-stitched fabric works pay homage to his maternal ancestors and figures entwined with the family. 2 To walk through these hanging tapestries, made from clothes donated by Siributr’s matriarchal relatives, is to be surrounded by fragmented physical and oral evidence and symbolism of his mother’s seven cousins — or ‘aunties’ in Thai culture. But this lineage is significant beyond the artist’s own family. After the mysterious death of King Rama VIII in 1946, Siributr’s great-uncle, Chit Singhaseni, a royal page and gentleman-in-waiting, was wrongfully imprisoned and later executed, like all who had been close to the royal victim. 18/28 is the address of the compound where Siributr’s great-grandmother took in Singhaseni’s remaining family, who were ostracised after his execution. Siributr’s sympathy for minorities surely stems, at least in part, from his family having been cast out in the wake of these events. As curator Iola Lenzi states: In its chronicling form and covert grappling with power, 18/28: The Singhaseni Tapestries joins a five-decade genealogy of Southeast Asian conceptual practice where formal splendour serves critical social discourse and citizen empowerment. 3 In a work that replaces tragedy with honour and beauty, Jakkai Siributr reminds us how significance lies in material and pictorial languages, while warning of the eternal danger of essentialist beliefs. Zara Stanhope Endnotes 1 The importance of the Singhaseni family can be traced back to Sing Singhaseni — given the official title of Phraya Bordindecha by the King — a prominent political and military figure in the reign of King Rama III. Most members of the Singhaseni family have served the royal family. 2 Tapestries include seven for the ‘aunties’ and one each for King Rama VII and King Rama IX. 3 Jakkai Siributr, unpublished quote from email to the author, 10 May 2018. jakkai siributr