Global Art Dialogues: Places of Resistance, from Hong Kong to Thailand

Thailand: Wednesday, Apr. 21, 9 AM 
Hong Kong: Wednesday, Apr. 21, 10 AM  

For this virtual Global Art Dialogue, we have invited two artists to share projects that respond to recent social protest movements. ACAB (All Cats Are Beautiful) and Sutthirat Supaparinya will reflect on the ways that certain spaces and sites of resistance can be powerful channels of memory and embody layers of history. Supaparinya, a multimedia artist featured in After Hope: Videos of Resistance, has been traveling around her country of Thailand documenting places that have witnessed acts of rebellion. Hong Kong–based artist ACAB has been collecting a series of commissioned videos about uprisings in different cities, themed around the act of walking. Gridthiya Gaweewong of the Jim Thompson Art Center will moderate this conversation focusing on shared strategies among movements and what it means to build trans-local networks of solidarity.  

Featuring artists from After Hope: Videos of Resistance. To learn more about the artists in After Hope, go to afterhope.com 

Image: When Need Moves the Earth, 2014, by Sutthirat Supaparinya. Synchronized three-channel video. Courtesy of the artist. 

ABOUT GLOBAL ART DIALOGUES

This program is a part of Global Art Dialogues, a series of programs connecting artists around the world to explore the pertinent issues of our time. Amid shifting social landscapes, the museum’s commitment to invest in emerging and established artists, elevate marginalized voices, and curate through a global lens of equity, justice, and collaboration is stronger now than ever. Whether these events are in person or virtual, we aim to create spaces to challenge and transcend physical, sociopolitical, and imaginary borders in order to empower change. By bringing together creatives from Bay Area and global communities, we are exploring the possibilities of what can be and what we can accomplish through a spirit of radical collaboration.   

ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS

• 
  ACAB (All Cats Are Beautiful)

  ACAB, together with several cultural workers from Hong Kong, initiated Global Uprising Footprint (G.U.F.), a documentary project that seeks to generate stories about recent global uprisings. G.U.F. is a platform for shared experiences and solidarity, and a step towards building a network of alliances among those who face social and political struggles and internal conflicts within their own movement organizations. Her zine series Siu2La3Ba1 documents the history of Hong Kong’s Anti-ELAB (Anti–Extradition Law Amendment Bill) movement through archiving protest songs, chanted slogans, and video games that emerged during the movement. 

• 
  Gridthiya Gaweewong

  Gridthiya Gaweewong is artistic director of the Jim Thompson Art Center in Bangkok. Her curatorial projects have addressed issues of social transformation confronting artists from Thailand and beyond since the Cold War. She has organized exhibitions and events, including Unreal Asia, Oberhausen International Short Film Festival (2010);  Saigon Open City in Saigon, Vietnam (2006–2007); the Bangkok Experimental Film Festival (1997–2007); Politics of Fun at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2005); and Underconstruction, Tokyo (2000–2002). Gaweewong was on the curatorial team for the 12th Gwangju Biennale, Imagined Borders, in 2018.  

• 
  Sutthirat Supaparinya

  Sutthirat Supaparinya’s works encompass a wide variety of mediums — installation, objects, still and moving images — mainly with a documentarian approach. Her artistic practice questions and interprets public information, and reveals its structures. Her recent projects focus on the impact of human activities on other humans and the landscape through political, historical, and literary lenses. Sutthirat earned a B.F.A. in painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts at Chiang Mai University and a postgraduate diploma in media arts from Hochschule Fuer Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig, Germany. She currently lives and works in Chiang Mai and Lamphun, Thailand.