"On the Threshold of the Senses" Exhibition
Tally Beck Contemporary Gallery
This event has ended.
Tally Beck Contemporary presents On the Threshold of the Senses: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia, an exhibition of works from Burma, Cambodia, Indonesia, The Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. The exhibition is curated by the Bangkok-based art critic and curator Brian Curtin, Ph.D.
On the Threshold of the Senses comprises nearly two dozen works in a variety of media, including photography, drawing, woodcut print and multimedia sculpture. The featured artists are Christina Dy (Philippines), Tada Hengsapkul (Thailand), Kriangkrai Kongkhanun (Thailand), Michael Lee (Singapore), Be Takerng Pattanopas (Thailand), Ohm Phanphiroj (Thailand), Thu Rein (Burma), Khvay Samnang (Cambodia), Maitree Siriboon (Thailand), Imhathai Suwatthansasilp (Thailand) and the Tarin Padi collective (Indonesia).
The exhibition will offer views of charged engagements with concerns that range from the politics of development to ancient belief systems to haunting stereotypes of urban life in this diverse region. Khvay Samnang and Taring Padi respond to the displacement of communities caused by land privatization with performance and agitprop. Kriangkrai Kongkhanun confronts us with a Buddhist vision of hell, and Ohm Phanphiroj creates disturbingly beautiful photographs of teenage male sex workers.
Through suggestions of immersion, the sensational, the rousing and the contemplative, this exhibition prompts us to consider questions of the knowledge that experience provides. Tada Hengsapkul’s photographs of provincial landscapes are inflected by an animist sensibility, and Thu Rein’s portraits of performance artists in states of physical transformation possess a terrible beauty. Maitree Siriboon combines visual elements of his rural Thai homeland with homoerotic imagery to disarmingly humorous effect.
The artists in On the Threshold of the Senses embrace the experiential as a means of addressing the complexity of the issues and contexts that attend the production and reception of their works. Not offering cool interventions or measured commentary, On the Threshold of the Senses challenges disinterested understandings of contemporary art by prompting us to look at what it means to respond and to act, in visual and material terms.
Media
Schedule
from March 21, 2012 to April 29, 2012
Opening Reception on 2012-03-21 from 18:00 to 20:00