The Speculative Archaeology of the Bangkok Art Biennale

The fourth Bangkok Art Biennale is a dramatic exercise in site-specificity. ‘Nurture Gaia’ – organized, as with previous editions, by Apinan Poshyananda – features over 240 artworks by 76 artists in 11 venues, which range from sleek showcases at heritage sites to museum-grade hangs in disorienting mall environments, such as the new One Bangkok. The biennial’s main funder, beverage giant ThaiBev, has a billionaire founder who counts One Bangkok among his assets; it is difficult to separate the art from commerce here. At times, this is to the detriment of the viewing experience.

The titular imperative to ‘Nurture Gaia’ feels loose as the overarching theme for this open-call show, and the artworks accordingly run the gamut. Some artists, drawing on Hindu traditions, opt for figurative and fierce depictions of ‘Gaia’. In the National Gallery of Thailand, Filipina artist Agnes Arellano’s Project Pleiades (2024) creates a scene of four nude, part-animal, part-human sculptures modelled on her own body, one of which hovers from the ceiling. A four-armed, fanged Kali, Hindu goddess of time and death, holds a decapitated head; another horned figure is six-breasted, a recurring motif in the show that folds monstrosity into its vision of women and motherhood.

Located near 18th-century linga (phallus) statues at Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (BACC) is French-American artist Louise Bourgeois’s Nature Study (1984), a headless bronze sculpture of a six-breasted, sphinx-like figure that draws on mythological iconography across cultures. The show also sees myth used to make sense of technology, as with Thai artist Supawich Weesapen’s richly hued paintings at the National Gallery. ‘Starry Web Regeneration’ (2023–24) is inspired by heavenly bodies as seen on a mobile screen and the Southeast Asian legend of spiders who wove the sky; these works meld ancient cosmologies with our networked present.

Within BACC’s maximalist presentation, the subtler works stand out. One is Amsterdam-based Burmese artist Moe Satt’s performative Body Inside T-shirt (2024), a durational work that saw the artist crouching, enveloped by a shirt, which was then cast with plaster. Hanging in the gallery, the garment-sculptures solidify the space his body formerly occupied. Also exhibited at BACC, three views of the West Bank from British artist Susan Collins’s 2016 ‘Land’ series – composited using imagery from surveillance cameras on Mount Scopus – are quietly powerful in where they direct our attention. Atmospheric fluctuations manifest as streams of colour across a landscape that can never be witnessed the same way again.

Another quiet standout, this time at Wat Bowon, is New York-based, Taiwanese artist Cole Lu’s The Engineers (2024). Two gated, portal-like archways are indistinguishable from the temple’s architecture until you notice the artist’s retro sci-fi engravings of enigmatic creatures on burnt Neem wood and linen, intended as a nod to early forms of writing. Attitudes toward displaying contemporary art in royal temples are clearly changing – a shift that chimes with the fact that these 18th-century Buddhist structures ‘were prone to eclecticism and open to all’, as Poshyananda told me.

At the National Museum Bangkok, relics of this past – tiny animal totems and King Rama V-era photographs of taxidermized animals – are staged beautifully with Thai artist Nakrob Moonmanas’s oversized resin fish sculptures (Fish, Fire, Fallout, 2024), which allude to Buddhist teachings whereby fish symbolize the universe’s origin and portend its end. In Dusadee Huntrakul’s installation A Verse for Nights (2024), also at the museum, the Thai artist thoughtfully pairs drawings and sculptures – brass gloves bearing eggs, coloured-pencil renderings of UFOs, a painted rock – with fossils and artifacts from the Ban Chiang archaeological site, poetically eliding the historical and the contemporary. This kind of speculative archaeology – which asks how we make, unmake and remake meaning – is what ‘Nurture Gaia’ does best.

The 2024 Bangkok Art Biennale, ‘Nurture Gaia’, is on view until 25 February

^{Main image: Dusadee, Huntrakul, A Verse for Nights, 2024, in ‘Nurture Gaia’, 2024, exhibition view. Courtesy: © the artist and the Bangkok Art Biennale; photograph: Preecha Pattaraumpornchai}